Posts Tagged ‘KENYA’
OBAMA OOO!–“YES WE CAN OOO!”–10 YEARS AGO!-FROM THE GRIO
November 4, 2018
Oprah skips Kenyan visit as Obama arrives | The Star, Kenya
July 20, 2018Oprah skips Kenyan visit as Obama arrives – The Star,Kenya
LUPITA NYONG’O’S ON VOGUE FOR THE SECOND TIME! -THIS BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY CONTINUES TO BREAK THE white/girl/no/color/no/nose/no/lips/no/hips/pale glass ceiling! BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY RISING AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING!
September 18, 2015
FROM FACEBOOK PAGE OF LUPITA
THIS BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY CONTINUES TO BREAK THE white/girl/no/color/no/nose/no/lips/no/hips/pale glass ceiling! BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY RISING AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING!
AAAAAAAAH. At last I can share this secret: my second Vogue cover is out!!! What an honor, joy and THRILL it was to work on this October issue. Thank you to @voguemagazine for hearing me out and making me feel so beautiful. @mertalas @macpiggott I love being in front of your lenses – thank you for bringing out the best of me! #TeamworkisDREAMwork @teamid @vernonfrancois @dilokritbarose. #coutureallday More on Vogue.com http://vogue.cm/1Y59BDL
LUPITA OOOO! -BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME! – ON THE COVER OF PARIS MATCH MAGAZINE!–FROM PRETTY PERIOD ON FACEBOOK
March 16, 2015
BLACK PEOPLE! – LUPITA NYONG’O MAKES THE COVER OF VOGUE MAGAZINE WITH HER BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY! -FROM VOGUE.COM
June 23, 2014
from vogue.com Lupita Nyong’o on Winning the Oscar, Becoming the Face of Lancôme, and Her First Cover of Vogue by Hamish Bowles | photographed by Mikael Jansson 34 Lupita Nyong’o first Vogue cover Photographed by Mikael Jansson, Vogue, July 2014 » SEE THE SLIDESHOW « In little more than a year, Lupita Nyong’o has made the leap from serious student to Oscar-winning actress and head-turning fashion star. Hamish Bowles catches up with Hollywood’s newest golden girl. Marrakech in May is unseasonably tagine-hot. Hapless tourists are being felled by sunstroke merely from sauntering across the city’s pulsing medina square, which is all but abandoned by the native food and trinket traders, snake-charmers, and storytellers who will throng it in the desert cool of evening. But in the oasis sanctuary of the Ksar Char-Bagh, all is balmy dolce far niente. A luxe spa hostelry built in imitation of a castle-like fort in the middle of the Palmeraie, it has crenellated towers that hide a private dipping pool and afford views down to a central marbled courtyard modeled on Granada’s Moorish Alhambra, and across the palm groves to the distant Atlas Mountains. Guests are lounging poolside in the shade of an allée of date palms, seemingly oblivious of the Academy Award–winning deity in their midst, who is the focus of the Vogue cover shoot in full fluster around them. Lupita Nyong’o is cucumber-cool, as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat goddess, dressed in Prada’s magenta Deco-print dress licked with silver that is dazzling against her luminous skin. Lupita instinctively falls into graceful attitudes; she can’t help herself. “She knows the camera, she knows her angles,” notes an approving Phyllis Posnick, Vogue’s Executive Fashion Editor, who, it should be noted, does not suffer fools gladly but is in some kind of awe of this particular subject. It is easy to see why. Lupita, 31, is as preternaturally poised as a prewar debutante, with a carefully modulated, cut-crystal accent and a quaint use of English to match. When she discusses one of the most harrowing scenes in the infinitely harrowing 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s magisterial movie in which she made her unforgettable screen debut as the tormented slave girl Patsey, she describes her character, delicately, as being “completely disrobed.” See Lupita Nyong’o’s best red carpet looks. At the BAFTAs at London’s Royal Opera House in February, I happened to follow Lupita’s blindingly flash-lit entrance on the red carpet as she artfully manipulated the emerald-green organza Dior ball gown billowing around her. There was nothing in this swanlike apparition to suggest how stressful the relentless awards-show circuit can be. “Still waters run deep,” she explains with an enigmatic smile. In all, Lupita attended 60-some promotional events during a grueling five-month odyssey that began with the Toronto Film Festival in early September 2013 (where she first blazoned the promise of fashion stardom in Prada’s white jersey goddess dress, trellised with golden sequins). Small wonder that The New York Times’s Guy Trebay noted the “military precision” with which her management and stylists approached the campaign to conquer the red carpet and burn Lupita’s image into the collective consciousness—garnering her, among other things, a lucrative contract with Lancôme. (As Isabella Rossellini, the international face of the brand for more than a decade, beginning in 1983, describes it, “Having this contract is winning the lottery” and provided her with “the freedom to make only the films that I liked and not the films I didn’t.”) Lupita appreciates the fact that Lancôme’s brand ambassadors, who currently include Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet, and Penélope Cruz, “are very different, unique women—it’s not about conforming to an already established idea of what is beautiful, and I like that.” In her meetings with the beauty house’s executives, she echoed powerful sentiments she expressed in a speech earlier in the year at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon. “I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful,” she told the audience that day, and described the sensation of having a flower bloom inside her when the Sudanese-born Alek Wek appeared on the modeling scene in the mid-nineties. Over dinner at Le Tobsil, a spice-colored riad restaurant in the medina, she tells me, “I felt how valuable and vital such representation is.” As we are serenaded by the hypnotic chant of the Gnawa musicians in the adjoining courtyard, I suggest to Lupita that she must have had a completely surreal year. “Indeed I did,” she says, laughing. “It just feels like the entertainment industry exploded into my life. People who seemed so distant all of a sudden were right in front of me and recognizing me—before I recognized them!” Her first real intimation that her life was changing—probably forever—came after the SAG Awards in January, when she arrived late one night at the airport and was mobbed by paparazzi. “For a split second I looked behind me to see who they were flashing at—and it was me!” she remembers. “That was, I think, the beginning of the end of my anonymity.” Though, as she recalls with a laugh, she lived for three years as a student in pants and a sweatshirt, Lupita has always enjoyed fashion. Growing up in Kenya, she designed many of her own clothes “because it was cheaper than buying retail,” including her own prom dress when she graduated from the all-boys high school she attended in Nairobi—girls were accepted only in two advanced-placement classes. “It was a velvet miniskirt with a matching little top and an iridescent silver translucent fabric that flowed to the ground,” she remembers. “It was kind of ridiculous, but it was fabulous at the time.” Lupita realized that she needed a more considered approach to her fashion choices as she prepared for the formidable season of appearances for 12 Years a Slave. She had worked with and befriended Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) on Non-Stop (a rollicking suspense vehicle for Liam Neeson that was released two days before the Academy Awards, with Lupita—in what more than one critic described as a meager role—as a flight attendant alongside Dockery). Dockery introduced her to her stylist, Micaela Erlanger, a protégée of the late Annabel Tollman, who helped shape the red-carpet personas of Scarlett Johansson and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, among others. Lupita arrived for their first meeting armed with a Pinterest board of fashion ideas that appealed to her: “Bold color, interesting print, interesting silhouette—simple but architectural and feminine,” Erlanger remembers. “Elegance, but with a sense of humor.” The pair proceeded to meet for “epic six-hour fittings,” says Lupita. “It’s a job; it’s work, you know!” she tells me. “We’d just try, try, try, try, try, try, try. At first it was very daunting, but I ended up really having fun with it.” Their choices have run the gamut from Christopher Kane and Sacai to custom Prada and Chanel Haute Couture. Most times, she adds, “especially for the bigger awards, the dress let me know it was going to be worn. It’s quite scary when you fall in love with a dress, because it’s nothing to do with your brain. It’s like a gut reaction.” The caped scarlet Ralph Lauren gown for the Golden Globes was a case in point: “We got goose bumps,” remembers Erlanger of that fitting. “I told her, ‘This is going to be a game-changer.’ And it was.” Lupita was cast in Miu Miu’s spring campaign alongside Elizabeth Olsen, Elle Fanning, and Bella Heathcote, and attended the label’s fashion show in Paris, dressed in a collared burgundy sweater under the sort of stiff little coat that Britain’s royal children have traditionally worn—the prim Good Girl foil to her front-row neighbor, Rihanna, who was working an eighties banjee-girl look in a runway-fresh Prada shearling coat, a plunging décolleté, and a Cleopatra bob. As for Lupita’s short crop, which she has worn since she was nineteen, hairstylists Ted Gibson, Larry Sims, and Vernon François have worked such iterations as a two-pronged Mohawk, a Grace Jones flat-top crew cut, a widow’s peak, and a Gumby. The bold and adventurous makeup choices she makes with Nick Barose, meanwhile, annex beauty as a virtual accessory to her wardrobe. “You spend so much time with your glam squad,” says Lupita. “Their energy is the last thing you experience before you leave the hotel room—and they make it fun and light and manageable.” Before she embarked on her fashion marathon, “everyone said, ‘Brace yourself, Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ ” she confides. “I didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for awards season,” she continues. “The red carpet feels like a war zone, except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take it.” She considers for a moment. “I hope they don’t make that the big quote!” she says, laughing. “Because that would be sad! Tell them not to do that!” It is understandable that Lupita would hesitate to trivialize the idea of internecine strife. Her current beau, the Somali-born rapper K’naan, has a preternatural serenity of his own that belies a childhood of unimaginable ferocity in his civil war–torn homeland, when he saw playmates die. (He fled with his family to Toronto, where, like so many of his disenchanted, rootless compatriots, he turned to a life of petty crime before reinventing himself through music, achieving global recognition when he adapted the lyrics of his anthemic “Wavin’ Flag” to become Coke’s official 2010 FIFA World Cup song.) Lupita’s childhood, though privileged, was hardly settled. Her father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a political-science professor, opposed the government of Daniel arap Moi, whose turbulent presidency lasted 24 years. Nyong’o’s brother “disappeared,” and Nyong’o was eventually self-exiled to Mexico, where Lupita was born in 1983. (Her name, in the symbolic Luo tradition, is a play on the word luo itself, which means “to follow,” and Peter is her father’s name, so that run together they suggest “I followed Peter to Mexico.” Lupita also speaks Swahili.) The family eventually returned to Nairobi, where her father continued to face intermittent persecution by the system, which changed with the election of Mwai Kibaki in 2002. He is currently a senator in the Kenyan parliament. He is also, let it be noted, an actor manqué, with a passion for Shakespeare, instilling in his daughter, along with her five siblings, an appetite for performance since childhood. “My family is very close-knit,” she explains. “My aunt, who was an actor herself, would get all us children together to write and perform plays. I loved manipulating my parents’ emotions.” When her mother, Dorothy, cried out at the tragic denouement of one of the plays, Lupita remembers “feeling very powerful.” They are clearly close; Dorothy has often accompanied her to awards shows, as have her siblings, including her acting-mad little brother, Peter. In Morocco, hearing that Dorothy fretted that her daughter wasn’t eating enough, Lupita spelled out I Love You with her Ksar Char-Bagh breakfast fruit and sent it to her as a charming freeze-frame iPhone video on Mother’s Day. At fourteen, Lupita secured her first legitimate role, playing Juliet with the Phoenix Players, Nairobi’s “vibrant semiprofessional theater,” and experienced the same thrill when the performance brought the audience to tears at the end. “That was when I realized that I really loved this thing called playacting.” Lupita’s father has a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and, like many middle-class Kenyans, Lupita was expected to continue her higher education abroad. So in 2003, at the age of 20, she began taking classes in film and African studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts—an experience that she found to be “a major culture shock” after her self-described “very conservative” schooling in Kenya. “I felt like I needed rules,” she says, “but in the end, it taught me that I am very self-motivated—I can make my own rules!” While at Hampshire, Lupita went home to Kenya and managed to finagle herself into working on the set of The Constant Gardener, which was shooting there. She met its star Ralph Fiennes and confided in him her passion to act. He firmly told her not to pursue it as a career unless it was something “I couldn’t live without”—advice that, as she admits, “gave me pause.” In Kenya, as she notes, acting “wasn’t a viable career path; it’s not necessarily seen as a prestigious profession.” Expectations ran high: Her cousin Isis Nyong’o (a former VP and managing director of the African operations of InMobi, the independent mobile advertising network) has been cited by Forbes as one of Africa’s most successful women. After undergraduate studies, Lupita returned home to Kenya, and she experienced something of an existential crisis before having “this vivid image of myself at 60, looking back at my life and really regretting that I hadn’t tried to be an actor. That was the dawn that I needed to start pursuing this.” She applied to Yale; if it didn’t work out, she would return to production. She had already written, directed, and produced a documentary for her Hampshire thesis project: In My Genes, about a friend’s experience living with albinism in Kenya, where the condition is considered a bad omen and those born with it are subject to discrimination—and worse (“I traveled all those thousands of miles just to learn about my next-door neighbor!” says Lupita). Without a theater library in Nairobi, Lupita reverted to her Juliet, and to high school pieces to perform for her Yale application, which involved auditioning on one day and waiting to hear whether you were going to be called back a month later. During the interview, she was asked when she was planning to return to Kenya. “After callbacks,” she replied. “They laughed, but it was true. I had to make that call, and that was of course very scary and presumptuous, but I was not going to sell myself short.” Lupita was accepted but delayed her arrival to appear in Shuga, the groundbreaking Kenyan soap opera that was produced by the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, in collaboration with the Kenyan government, intended to promote “responsible sexual behavior and tolerance.” (It was aired in 46 African countries and subsequently in over sixteen more around the world.) When she finally arrived at Yale, among so many dedicated students, the experience was revelatory, even if the schedule was unforgiving—“In one day you’re playing five different characters,” and between class and rehearsals she was often studying from 9:00 in the morning until 1:00 the following morning. But even so, as she prepared for her final-semester showcases (presented in New York and Los Angeles to a packed house of agents, managers, producers, and casting directors), she was also working on an audition tape for the role of Patsey. By his account, Steve McQueen had already seen “thousands” of actresses for the role, but when he saw that tape, as he told Vogue, “It was like looking for a piece of glass on a sandy beach and finding a jewel. . . . She has this aura about her.” Working with his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt (“They are like tango dancers,” notes Lupita), and filming her scenes in an almost documentary way, McQueen (who won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 as a video artist) potently captured that aura onscreen. “I was really nervous about seeing myself in 12 Years a Slave,” says Lupita, “because it had been such a profound experience in all ways. I remember it being one of the most joyful times in my life—and also one of the most sorrowful. I didn’t want my experience to be a vain one. But I will say that when I watched it, my heartstrings were pulled so tight for Solomon that I couldn’t go into the ego trip. I cried—I mean, I was inconsolable. I wept for an hour after the movie.” Lupita’s tears were the beginning of a journey that led to her Academy Award. “I had already gotten the nomination, which was truly, truly astounding, and enough,” she remembers. “Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.” When her name was read out, the experience was, as she recalls, “very confusing, very numbing. I was just repeating my name in my head, so I didn’t know whether I had said my name or they had said my name! And then my little brother screamed, and time was suspended and it was just noise in my head.” As Lupita gathered those voluminous silk georgette pleats of her custom Prada skirts, she remembers that all she could think was “Don’t fall on those stairs” because, as she drolly explains, “it’s not cute if you follow Jennifer Lawrence—it’s not cute if you’re the second one!” “People are still filling me in on what happened after,” she adds. “My mother says I cried during the speech; I don’t believe her.” Those waters do indeed run deep: She was memorably poised, her acceptance speech a model of erudition. “When I look down at this golden statue,” she said, “may it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.” So it was that Lupita appeared to spring into our lives fully formed, both as a consummate movie actress receiving her profession’s highest honor and as an intriguing fashion star and superlative beauty icon. She is quick to note that her “red carpet” self “is just one aspect of me; it doesn’t represent the entirety of me, which I am at peace with.” She keeps her private life just that. “The safest thing is when I’m indoors in my world,” she says, which for the moment is an apartment in Brooklyn. When she isn’t cooking at home (“I like to cook whole fish. And I make some mean salads”), she is enjoying the borough’s unpretentious restaurants and bars. The complicated question of how to follow Lupita’s dream debut is one that has clearly been exercising the actress and her management, who recently confirmed that she will be providing the voice for Raksha in Disney’s live-action/CGI hybrid revisiting of The Jungle Book. The news that she’d also been cast alongside Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie in J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars: Episode VII, out Christmas 2015, meanwhile, sent the Internet into a collective frenzy. “I’m going to a galaxy far, far away,” Lupita told me with a laugh as the announcement was made in early June. In the meantime, she says, “I’m really hungry to get back onstage. It flexes muscles that you need to do the more subtle film work.” She is particularly keen on the writing of the actor-playwright Danai Gurira and loves her plays Eclipsed, about the Liberian civil war, and The Convert, set in southern Africa, about the birth of Christianity on the continent. Like her boyfriend, K’naan, she is very engaged by the myriad issues confronting their homelands. She recently signed on to both coproduce—in partnership with Brad Pitt’s Plan B and two other partners—and star in an adaptation of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s acclaimed novel about the African immigrant experience, Americanah. “The book blew me away,” she tells me. “This was a project I wanted to work on, and I pursued it with all my being. It’s an unabashedly romantic book, really inspiring and uplifting. I found myself in her pages.” On top of all that, she has a yen for some more Shakespeare. “I thought I’d had my fill at Yale, but . . . oh, boy, I guess there’s nothing like the Bard!” she says, laughing. “I absolutely adore Twelfth Night.” She adds that in the future, Cleopatra and “Lady M” are top of her wish list. As a child watching Star Wars for the first time, Lupita was intrigued by R2-D2 and C-3PO. “They just resonated with me,” she says. “Being able to convey emotions with just a few digital sounds—it speaks of good storytelling.” That storytelling is still holding her in thrall. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to be working in these fantastical realms,” she says. “They’re worlds away from 12 Years a Slave, that’s for sure—but that kind of diversity is what dreams are made of.” For more from Vogue, download the digital edition from iTunes, Kindle, Nook Color, and Next Issue. 1 June 19, 2014 6:00a.m. Summer Style Made Easy From the best beach accessories to the new crop of swimwear designers making waves right now, here, everything you need to know for a stylish summer. View Now 2 Discussions by marie6gaillard I had boycotted the magazine but now I will buy this issue asap. Lupita is absolutely stunning and talented. Now this is fashion. Excellent choice! Posted 6/19/2014 3:56:44pm Reply Approve Report by nucubidze-1997 Hello! I am Mariam Nucubidze! 16 Years! Eager to stars work in Vogue.(The assistant of Anna Wintour)..I am Very enthusiastic and creative.I Love Writing.I have created a television program Project %u201ETeen%u201C(I have a patented).I love news and new Ideas.I have Ideas About in your Magazine.I know the psychology of the people and wishes.But I dont live in the USA.I am from Georgia.(Georgia is a country,not a state.The capital -Tbilisi) If you Hire me for work and a chance for me to ensure my arrival in America.Thank You for your attention.(Write me this email(nucubidze-1997@mail.ru) or call me on phone ( 995 555 107 817)) P.S (If you read my letter,Tell her that I love and am a fan of Anna) Posted 6/21/2014 1:46:20am Reply Approve Report
OBAMA COOL ! -OUR BLACK PRESIDENT IS JUST TOOO COOL!-FROM HUFFINGTON POST
April 21, 2014from huffingtonpost.com
Chris Matthews: Obama “Elite” For Wearing Sunglasses
Media Matters:
Here’s MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, moments ago, suggesting Barack Obama is “elite” in part because Obama was wearing sunglasses:
Can Barack Obama, a man of elite education if not elite background, break into the middle class and talk regular? Can he talk to regular people in their kitchens tonight, in their living rooms?
[…]
Everybody thinks Barack is too cool. In other words, there he is with the shades, getting on the plane. A little bit too elegant, a little bit too proud of his own bearing. Is that a problem, that he’s just too cool for words. In other words, elite.
THIS BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY LEARNED TO LOVE HER GOD-GIVEN BLaCK BEAUTY!-FROM BUZZFEED.COM
March 6, 2014
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mackenziekruvant/lupita-nyongo-essence-speech-black-
beauty?s=mobile
Lupita Nyong’o Delivers Moving Speech About How She Learned To Love The Color Of Her Skin
The Oscar nominated actress spoke candidly in her Black Women in Hollywood acceptance speech about her struggle to understand her own beauty.
posted on February 28, 2014 at 12:58

Yesterday, Lupita Nyong’o won the Essence Magazine Black Women In Hollywood Breakthrough Performance Award.
And while she has fast become one of the most idolized women on the red carpet in years…Lupita told the audience that she has not always felt that comfortable with the color of her skin.
Here is the full transcript of her beautifully honest speech.
I wrote down this speech that I had no time to practice so this will be the practicing session. Thank you Alfre, for such an amazing, amazing introduction and celebration of my work. And thank you very much for inviting me to be a part of such an extraordinary community. I am surrounded by people who have inspired me, women in particular whose presence on screen made me feel a little more seen and heard and understood. That it is ESSENCE that holds this event celebrating our professional gains of the year is significant, a beauty magazine that recognizes the beauty that we not just possess but also produce.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about beauty, Black beauty, dark beauty. I received a letter from a girl and I’d like to share just a small part of it with you: “Dear Lupita,” it reads, “I think you’re really lucky to be this Black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”
My heart bled a little when I read those words, I could never have guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and of itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the same way that the women of The Color Purple were to me.
I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned. The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first. And every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I was the day before. I tried to negotiate with God, I told him I would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted, I would listen to my mother’s every word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little lighter. But I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.
And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse, as you can imagine happens with adolescence. My mother reminded me often that she thought that I was beautiful but that was no conservation, she’s my mother, of course she’s supposed to think I am beautiful. And then Alek Wek came on the international scene. A celebrated model, she was dark as night, she was on all of the runways and in every magazine and everyone was talking about how beautiful she was. Even Oprah called her beautiful and that made it a fact. I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman who looked so much like me, as beautiful. My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden Oprah was telling me it wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me, when I saw Alek I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty. But around me the preference for light skin prevailed, to the beholders that I thought mattered I was still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me you can’t eat beauty, it doesn’t feed you and these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.
And what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty was that you can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you. That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul. It is what got Patsey in so much trouble with her master, but it is also what has kept her story alive to this day. We remember the beauty of her spirit even after the beauty of her body has faded away.
And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside, that there is no shade in that beauty.
”
Confirmed: Lupita could not be more beautiful.

OBAMA! -BLACK REACTION TO BLACK OBAMA’S ELECTION-2012!
December 11, 2012
o
OBAMA!- NEW BOOK ON OBAMA-“THE FIRST:PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE” BY BLACK JOURNALIST ROLAND S. MARTIN
February 17, 2011FROM YEYEolade.blogspot.com
Thursday, February 17, 2011
OBAMA! -NEW BOOK ON OBAMA -“THE FIRST:PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE” BY BLACK JOURNALIST ROLAND S. MARTIN!
FROM aalbc.com
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the firstThe First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House as Originally Reported by Roland S. Martin
Click to order via Amazon
by Roland S. Martin
Includes a DVD of the author’s interviews with the Obamas
Paperback: 372 pages
Publisher: Third World Press; 1 edition (January 31, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0883783169
ISBN-13: 978-0883783160
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
Book Review by Kam Williams
“On February 10, 2007, Barack Hussein Obama stood before thousands waiting in the cold in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois and made his intentions known: he was running for president. This book traces tracks this journey through my eyes as I covered the improbable road to the presidency of Obama…
My aim in publishing this book is to offer an historical account of covering this stunning and exciting race, but to also offer in real-time the ups and downs of the campaign, and even take a look back at various moments from my perspective , as well as those of some of the entertainers and others I crossed paths with along the way.”
-Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. xxii-xxiii)
If you’re interested in revisiting the 2008 Presidential campaign from the perspective of an African-American journalist afforded access to candidate Barack Obama, then this coffee table keepsake was undoubtedly designed with you in mind. For, between December of 2006 and Election Day a couple years later, Roland Martin filed hundreds of reports, in his capacity as a political correspondent for the CNN and TV-One Networks, as a radio talk show host, and as a nationally-syndicated columnist.
The First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House is essentially a chronological rehash of Martin’s interviews, articles and news stories which collectively paint a complete picture of the evolution of Obama from long shot to contender to favorite to the first black President of the United States.
What is likely to make this opus fairly absorbing for the average history buff is the fact that these real-time entries accurately reflect the pulse of the country at each moment of the campaign, as the political sands shifted back and forth beneath the feet of the pivotal players.
It’s all recounted here, mostly in the author’s own words, from the Iowa caucuses (“All of a sudden, there is a sense that Obama actually could win this thing.”) to the Michelle Obama patriotism question (“Was it a big deal. Nope?”) to the Reverend Wright controversy (“I fundamentally believe that whites and blacks reacted differently [to] the snippets of Wright’s preaching.”). Overall, the astute observations of a partisan who never hid his allegiances yet still proved pretty prescient in terms of forecasting the outcome of the landmark presidential election.
Related Links
Read an Interview with the author about this book
http://aalbc.com/reviews/roland_martin.html
All of Roland Martin’s Book and another Interview
http://aalbc.com/authors/roland_s_martin.htm
77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777
from rolandsmartin.com
Thursday, February 17th
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The First
Get your copy of Roland S. Martin’s new book today!
Washington, D.C. – January 12, 2010 – Award-winning journalist Roland S. Martin, who captured the first interview with President Barack Obama regarding the racial controversy surrounding Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), releases his third book, The First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House on January 20, 2010. The book marks the first year anniversary of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The First takes readers behind-the-scenes for a closer look at his interviews with both Barack and Michelle Obama for CNN, TV ONE, Essence.com, WVON-AM in Chicago and the Tom Joyner Morning Show over the last two years. The book includes insider details that go beyond the regular reports, like original coverage of celebrities who were heavily invested in the election, sixteen pages of color photos, and a DVD featuring two interviews with Martin and President Obama on TV ONE that won back-to-back NAACP Awards.
As a member of CNN’s “Best Political Team on Television” and political editor for the TV ONE Cable Network during the election
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campaigns, Martin found himself in the catbird seat while one of the most momentous events in black history was on a collision course with destiny. Now, his new book, which is being co-published by Martin and Third World Press, takes readers back down President Barack Obama’s campaign trail in a chronological journal of events that dates back to when then Senator Obama had yet to announce his candidacy and follows him on his journey to the presidency.
“It was always amazing to listen to journalism icons like Vernon Jarrett, Lerone Bennett and Sam Lacy talk about covering some of the major stories of the 20th century, such as Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color barrier, Muhammad Ali’s rise to become heavyweight champion, and the Civil Rights Movement. Covering the eventual election of President Barack Obama was on par with those historic achievements. To have a front row seat at history was amazing, and I wanted to serve as sort of my recollection of the campaign as it was unfolding. It was also amazing to go back and talk to individuals who hit the campaign for then-Sen. Obama, and get an understanding of their motivations, and the raw emotions they felt as the race went down to the wire and history was made. “This campaign dominated my life for two years and it was worth every moment.”
Through his charismatic writing style, Martin presents an in-depth analysis of the presidential campaign and Obama’s struggles and successes. He gives readers insight on how each important event played out in front of the nation and also shares interviews from his broadcasts, including a one-on-one conversation with President Obama after his win in Iowa in January 2008. Other notable interviews include Dr. Cornel West, Rep John Lewis, Spike Lee, Maxine Waters and Michael Eric Dyson.
Roland Martin is a multi-faceted journalist, reporting on many different platforms including, television, radio, newspapers and online. He is the host and Managing Editor for TV One’s “Washington Watch with Roland Martin,” and a CNN contributor, appearing on a variety of the network’s shows. In addition, he is a senior analyst for the Tom Joyner Morning Show providing daily reports for the program. And is a syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate.
In addition to his interviews with President Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama, Martin has recently made waves in the media with high profile interviews including Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele on TV ONE and General Colin Powell on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Earlier this year, he was presented the “Broadcaster of the Year” Award by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and was named one of EBONY magazine’s “Power 150″ for the third year in a row.
Roland S. Martin is also the author of Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith, and Speak Brother: A Black Man’s View of America.
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Roland S. Martin
(THE FIRST) President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House as Originally Reported by Roland S. Martin [With DVD] by Martin, Roland S.(Author)Paperback{The First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House as Originally Reported by Roland S. Martin [With DVD]} on01-Jan-2010
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