Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library Celebrates a Decade

  

   John W. Franklin of the Smithsonian and Wilma Webb, former Colorado state legislator

         Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library Celebrates a Decade

                           Documenting the Past, Projecting into the Future

                                                                 by Annette Walker

     'Until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters'
                                                      An African Proverb

     “We salute the Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library,” said John W. Franklin, Senior Program Manager at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.  He was in Denver in April for Blair-Caldwell's 10^th anniversary recognition.

     "Blair-Caldwell has joined a very important group of resources in our nation, among them the Schomburg Research Library in New York City, the Moreland-Spingarn Library at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the Vivian Harsh Collection in Chicago as places that collect and preserve our history,” Franklin continued.    

     “The history of this area is in safe hands under the wonderfully talented and compassionate staff at the Blair Caldwell. We at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture are pleased to be here because we recognize that around the nation each place has a specific history, but our histories link us together as one nation, whether we’re in Hawaii, Vermont, Florida or Chicago.   The African American experience is unique, but we are linked together by this shared past. It is up to us to share this knowledge with our young people, because if we fail to teach them everything we know, we have failed at our job.”

     Franklin, who is the son of the renowned historian John Hope Franklin, noted the importance of the library's 3rd floor Legacy Exhibit.  "It commences in 1500 becaus^e  that is when we came and we went everywhere; we went to Florida as well as to Puerto Rico and eventually California.  Our history in this country did not begin in 1619 in the British colonies.  It is complicated and involves the French, the Spanish, the Dutch as well as the British”, he said.

     The Blair-Caldwell Library is one of five public libraries in the United States whose mission is the collection and preservation of African-American society.  The first was the Schomburg Library in New York City which was established in 1926.  The Black Resource Center of the Los Angeles public library system opened in 1978.  The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History was inaugurated in 1994 in Atlanta, Georgia.  The African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida opened in 2002.  The Blair-Caldwell Library, the fifth public library with this focus, opened in 2003.
     In addition, an increasing number of public and university libraries house special collections of African-American memorabilia.                                                                    
     In 1997 former Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife Wilma Webb developed an idea for an African-American research center with Charleszine 'Terri' Nelson, a senior librarian with the Denver Public Library (DPL).  The Mayor then approached officials within DPL and an agreement was reached.
     "The vision of the library was to provide a physical space for our history to be kept and maintained," said Wilma Webb, also a former state legislator.  "It would be a place that would be a community icon for our community to meet, to organize, to inspire, to be educated and to share the wisdom of elders," she continued.    
     For the next five years Nelson and Gwendolyn Crenshaw, a senior librarian in DPL's Western History division engaged in the complex task of creating a new institution.  On April 25, 2003 the Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library had a grand opening with Mayor Wellington Webb officiating.
     As a repository of written and visual documents, the Blair-Caldwell library is a trailblazing institution for Colorado and surrounding states.  "Much of our collection has come from individuals and organizations," said Terri Nelson, now Senior Special Collection and Community Resource Manager based at Blair-Caldwell.
     "Every week people come here seeking information about their families, neighborhoods, and even areas outside Denver," said Danny Walker, senior librarian.
     "Among our early commitments was videotaping oral histories of senior citizens who had made important contributions as well as those individuals were the first African-Americans in their careers and other endeavors," said Nelson.  "We now have about 100 oral histories and dozens of collections, including those from churches, Wellington and Wilma Webb and other elected officials and community leaders," she continued.
     The library has some publications not found in other Denver Public Library branches.  Among them are the Black Scholar; CRISIS, the quarterly journal of the national NAACP; and the Journal of Negro History which began publishing in the early 20th century.
     Beyond gathering documents and photographs, the staff has developed ongoing activities, such as film and literary series, art exhibits, and special programs in February during Black History Month.
     The library has developed partnerships with major local and national institutions, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Colorado History.  Some recent exhibitions have resulted from these partnerships.
     "Ten years later the Blair-Caldwell library is known nationally for its resources and collections, and is a place that the entire state should be proud of for it is our history," said Wilma Webb.
 

Cuba: Beyond Jay-Z And Beyonce's Trip

Colorado Committee on Africa and the Caribbean

                           CUBA:  BEYOND JAY-Z AND BEYONCE'S TRIP

    

                                                                                April 14, 2013

     After a week of news reports about a possible investigation into Jay-Z and Beyonce's trip to Cuba, their journey has been declared legal.  We should keep in mind that the call for the investigation was the handiwork of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Bogart, both Florida-based Cuban exiles, both Republicans and members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
     Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican Cuban-American who is often touted as a possible candidate for President, has appeared on many TV programs referring to Beyonce and Jay-Z as "hypocrites"

     This situation raises the issue of the irrationality and absurdity of the 52-year-old U.S. policy towards Cuba and the need to normalize relations with the nation located 90 miles from Key West, Florida.  Our irrational policy includes:   a) a trade embargo intended to make the people of Cuba so frustrated and distressed that they would rise up against the Cuban Revolutionary Government.  Not only has this policy failed, but since 1991 the United Nations General Assembly has passed annual resolutions condemning the U.S. trade embargo.
     Last year 188 of the 193 nations in the United Nations voted for this resolution.  Furthermore, a wide range of international diplomatic organizations have rejected the embargo.  Among these groups are CARICOM (Caribbean Community of nations); the Community of Latin American and Caribbean states (CELAC); the Summit of the African Union; and the Ministerial and Summit meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement.  
     b) categorizing Cuba as "a terrorist nation".  The Missile Crisis is 51 years behind us.  Unlike North Korea, a few Middle Eastern and other nations, Cuba has no missiles ready to launch.

          c)  Travel Restrictions    In violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law, the United States requires its own citizens to obtain a "special license" to travel to Cuba.  Violations may result in huge fines or event incarceration.  Hypocritically, the U.S. government allows its citizens to travel to China, Vietnam, the Middle East and other nations with which the U.S. has political differences.

                          ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

     From 1953-1958 the 26th of July Movement (among them Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara) led an armed struggle against the government of Fulgencio Batista, who was supported by the United States.  Among other things, the revolutionaries promised to improve the social and economic conditions of poor people. 

     These statistics are verified by United Nations agencies that conduct investigations and issue reports on all nations of the world.

                                      1959                        1999          Rank in Latin America

Literacy                           62%                         98%           #1

Life Expectancy              60 yrs                      76 yrs         #1

Infant Mortality rate        64/1000                  7.5/1000    #1

# Physicians                    3,000                       65,000        #1

                                                                          (1/200)

     In 2012 the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) declared that Cuba is the only Latin American and Caribbean country without child malnutrition.  On the contrary at least 146 million children are suffering from malnutrition worldwide (Central Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and other Latin American and Caribbean nations).
     In 2009 the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) indicated that despite the fact that Cuba is a poor nation and has been subjected to the economic and trade embargo by the United States, Cuba is outstanding in the health and education of its people.
     Cuba has wiped out the infectious diseases and epidemics that plague other developing nations.  Cuba's public health system, with its comprehensive family doctor program and tertiary care facilities that deliver services on par with many developed countries, is recommended as a "model for the world" by the World Health Organization.
     It is time to NORMALIZE RELATIONS WITH CUBA.

                
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Leymah Gbowee- Liberian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Keynotes Denver Peace Jam Luncheon -- by Annette Walker

                                

     Leymah Gbowee's theme, ‘Moving Forward in Tough Times’, at the Peace Jam Awards Luncheon could have been drawn directly from the trajectory of her life. 

     She was just 17 years old in 1989 when civil war erupted in Liberia, unleashing the destructive forces inherent in such conflicts and enduring fourteen years.  Although she enrolled in the University of Liberia, her academic aspirations as well as family life were disrupted and she was forced to embark upon an uncharted path.  Gbowee was able to convert feelings of outrage and opposition to constructive efforts to end conflict and build peace.  In the process she has become not only a counselor, trauma healer and social worker, but an inspirational leader.  At age 39 she received the Nobel Peace Prize, published a memoir about her remarkable life and figured prominently in the documentary film ‘Pray the Devil Back To Hell’.

     Over 500 people attended the event at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.   Gbowee noted that her busy itinerary takes her from one end of the globe to the other.

     "Everywhere I go I become aware of people dealing with many problems, such as poverty, rape and other crimes and political oppression just to name a few," she said.  "And sometimes I feel overwhelmed and ask myself if anywhere in the world is free of serious problems.  But I am encouraged when I learn that everywhere people organize themselves to resolve these issues," she continued.

     "I am deeply impressed with the role of many young people in struggles for peace and justice.  And all this has resulted in the reaffirmation of my commitment to peace and justice," she declared.

     Gbowee presented Peace Jam Hero awards to youth as well as adults engaged in positive change activities locally, nationally and globally.

     In her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, she related that in 1996 when the war temporarily subsided, she had two children and was accepted into a UNICEF-supported program to counsel people traumatized by the war.  A couple of years later she enrolled in the Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program (THRP) operated by a Lutheran church where her family had membership.  That event marked her entry into a career centered on emotional healing and conflict resolution.  Within a short time she transitioned from assisting individuals to assisting a nation.

     When she entered the THRP program in 1998, the West African Network for Peace Building (WANEP) the first of its kind in that region, was established in neighboring Ghana.  She met some of the staff when they were in Liberia and relates how she began reading about peace building in the works of Mennonite theologians as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and some African thinkers.

     In 1999 Gbowee met some of the women involved in WANEP and in 2000 she was able to attend a women’s conference in Ghana   In her memoir she describes her excitement and how she was able for the first time in her life to talk about the painful parts of her life story including sleeping on the floor of a hospital corridor with a newborn baby for a week because she had no money to pay the bill and no one to help her.

     “No one else in Africa was doing this focusing only on women and only on building peace,” she wrote in her memoir.

     Within a year the women of WANEP launched the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET).  Although established in Ghana, an affiliate was opened in Liberia with Gbowee as coordinator of the Liberian Women’s Initiative.   

     At the Peace Jam luncheon she talked about the importance of allowing women to talk about themselves.  “Women were never encouraged to talk to each other,” she said.

     Meantime the civil war had reignited and 20 Liberian women convened.  “We talked not only about what we could do, but how just as war was considered a male thing, so too was peace building considered a male endeavor,” she said.  “Women were never encouraged to be involved in public matters,

     Gbowee frequently refers to the night in the spring of 2002 when she fell asleep in the WIPNET office and had a dream.  She says that God told her, “Gather the women and pray for peace!”  Subsequently, she told her Lutheran co-workers about her dream and they suggested that God was telling Gbowee herself that she should initiate that action.

     She followed their advice.  A few months later with the help of Christian and Muslim women of all the ethnic groups in the country, she helped establish the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.  Thousands of women gathered in Monrovia, the capital city, for months and prayed for peace, held nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins in defiance of orders from President Charles Taylor under whose leadership the civil occurred.

     In April 2003 Taylor relented and granted a meeting with the women.  Two thousand women amassed outside his executive mansion and they designated Gbowee their spokesperson.  Her comments to him are well-known:

          “We are tired of war.  We are tired of running. We are tired of begging

            For bulgur wheat.  We are tired of our children being raped.  We are

            now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children.  Because

            We believe, as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask

            us, ‘Mama what was your role during the crisis?’

     Taylor promised the women that he would attend peace talks in Ghana to negotiate with the rebel groups.  In June 2003 Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to put pressure on the warring factions during the peace-talk process.  As portrayed in the film ‘Pray the Devil Back to Hell’, in an attempt to be taken seriously, the women’s behavior was sometimes dramatic.

     The Liberian war ended officially weeks later, with the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement Act on August 18, 2003.

     “What we (women) did marked the beginning of the end,” remarked Gbowee.

      The women’s movement was a crucial factor in the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf not only as Liberia’s first woman president, but Africa’s first democratically-elected woman president.  Charles Taylor went into exile and earlier this year was convicted and incarcerated in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

     Both Sirleaf and Gbowee (along with Tawakkul Karman of Yemen) received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. 

     From 2003-2007 Gbowee studied and received an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from the Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the United States.  She has won a dozen international awards and continues to ‘multitask’.  Now 40 years old and the mother of six children, she is Executive Director of the Women, Peace and Security Network- Africa as well as Founder and President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation -Africa, based in Monrovia.

The Peace Jam Foundation is headquartered in Arvada, Colorado.  Its motto is ‘Change Starts Here’.  Its mission is to create young leaders committed to positive change in themselves, their communities, and the world through the inspiration of Nobel Peace Laureates who pass on the spirit, skills, and wisdom they embody.

     (This article appeared in the December 2012 issue of the Urban Spectrum, Denver, Colorado.)

Cornel West Links Art, Social Justice and the Meaning of Humanity

            Cornel West Links Art. Social Justice and the Meaning of Humanity
                                     

                                                                    by Annette Walker

     Cornel West is a philosopher endowed with poetic discourse and a commitment to social transformation grounded in courage, compassion and love.  The Princeton University professor was the keynote speaker at the recent Art of Social Justice conference at the Auraria campus.  The evening event attracted a crowd of 1,000 people.

     Organized by the Collective for Social Justice, a student group, the three-day conference explored a broad range of topics, such as labor, corporate responsibility, the prison complex, food production, indigenous rights, education, women's issues, ethnicity within the current political atmosphere, and the Occupy movement.
     "The main goal of the conference was to speak to the interconnectedness of a broad range of issues and to provide tangible definitions to the term "social justice" by showcasing the people doing the real work," said Candace Johnson, a member of the Collective.  "Another goal was to bring together activists from a wide range of fields and have them connect with each other to see the overlap and fill in the gaps," she continued.

     The conference, however, involved more than these traditional social issues.  There were also workshops on self-empowerment and uses of new media.  West's talk was preceded by a powerful presentation by local poet Dominique Ashaheed whose themes ranged from the present controversy regarding Trayvon Martin to the murder of Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955. 

     West was an appropriate person to address art and social justice because he seamlessly blends both into his scholarship and activism.  During his Auraria presentation he described life in 2012 in the United States as ". . . .a disappearing middle class on the vanilla side, gangster activity on Wall Street, a shadow banking system, the prevalence of greed, and the Horatio Alger mystique still remains in America."
     He then applauded writers that he called "truth tellers" for their portrayals of various aspects of American society.  "Thank God for Eugene O'Neill for The Iceman Cometh and Steven Sondheim for Pacific Overtures; and thank God for Toni Morrison for Beloved as well as James Baldwin who didn't need to go to college to make his contributions," West exclaimed.
     Jazz great John Coltrane and other musicians, such as Charles Mingus and Bruce Springsteen frequently become metaphors in West's oratory.

     West acknowledges the tremendous influence that some artists, writers and musicians have had on his thinking.  Most notable is the impact of the groundbreaking work of Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian playwright and short story writer.  West even defines himself as a Chekhovian.
     His fascination with Chekhov involves the main fundamental question that motivates his writing.  What does it mean to be human?  As a philosopher, West says that "the existential quest for meaning is at the center of my thought."
     "I find the incomparable works of Anton Chekhov--the best singular body by a modern artist--to be the wisest and deepest interpretations of what human beings confront in their daily struggles," West writes in his introduction to The Cornel West Reader.  "His salutary yet sad portraits of the nearly eight thousand characters in his stories and plays--comparable only to Shakespeare's variety of personages--provide the necessary ground, the background noise, of any acceptable view of what it means to be human," he continues.
     West admires Chekhov's avoidance of facile solutions to social problems.  "I find inspiration in his refusal to escape from the pain and misery of life by indulging in dogmas, doctrines or dreams as well as abstract systems, philosophic theodicies, or political utopias.
     Although Cheknov was a religious agnostic, West affirms his own Christianity and also refers to himself as a 'Chekhovian Christian'.  "By this I mean that I am obsessed with confronting the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world," he writes in the Introduction in the Reader.  "And I am determined to explore the intellectual sources and existential resources that feed our courage to be, courage to love and courage to fight for democracy."
     Although West's Ph.D dissertation was entitled The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, he considers himself a non-Marxist socialist.  He considers Marxist thought a legitimate part of the Western stream of the larger modern articulation of historical consciousness, and he accepts some of its doctrines, but questions others.  However, he emphatically rejects the trashing of Marxism by the U.S. liberal academy.
     West serves as honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America which he describes as ". . .the first multiracial, socialist organization close enough to my politics that I could join."
     Regarding the recent phenomenon known as the Occupy Wall Street movement, West actively supports it.  In October 2011 he participated in the Occupy protest on the steps of the Supreme Court and was arrested for violating a law against protest signs at that location.  He later participated in an Occupy protest in Norfolk, Virginia.
     At the Auraria conference he described the Occupy movement as "the deep democratic awakening in America."  Last Fall during an interview with Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now television and radio program, he responded to those critics who contend that the movement lacks a clear and unified message.  "It's impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand, or two demands.  We're talking about a democratic awakening. . .you're talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what's going on through a set of different lens, and then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be.  Because in the end we're really talking about what Martin Luther King would call a revolution.  A transfer of power from oligarchs to everyday people of all colors.  And that is a step-by-step process."
     West cautions against the temptations of our market-driven, materialistic society in which people yield to the frivolous and superficial rather than to serious matters.  "It is easy to become indifferent to evil and to other people's suffering," he said during the Auraria lecture.  “Indifference is more evil than evil itself.”
     He also warned against confusing philanthropy with justice.  "We want to create a society in which charity is not needed," he said.    
     There has been some controversy about West's comments about President Barack Obama.  In 2008 he publicly supported Obama and addressed a crowd of 1000 people at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York.  However, he has been critical especially of the President's war policy.  In his talk at Auraria he pointed out that under President George Bush there were 44 drone attacks and under President Obama there have been 239.  He is also critical of increasing military spending while cutting the budget for housing, health and education.
     "I support principles, not individuals nor some of Obama's policies," West said.  He also called the Democratic Party "spineless" on many issues and characterized Obama as a liberal.
     Cornel West remains in the struggle.  He and Tavis Smiley have co-authored a new book entitled The Rich and The Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.