enslaved Africans

Black innovators who reshaped American gardening, farming

The achievements of George Washington Carver, the 19th century scientist credited with hundreds of inventions, including 300 uses for peanuts, have landed him in American history textbooks. But many other agricultural practices, innovations and foods that traveled with enslaved people from West Africa _ or were developed by their descendants _ remain unsung, despite having revolutionized the way we eat, farm and garden. Among the medicinal and food staples introduced by the African diaspora were sorghum, millet, African rice, yams, black-eyed peas, watermelon, eggplant, okra, sesame and kola nut, whose extract was a main ingredient in the original Coca-Cola recipe.

Disney+ Streaming Service Places Restrictions on ‘Classics’ with Racist Stereotypes  

“The crows and musical numbers pay homage to racist minstrel shows, where White performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing imitated and ridiculed enslaved Africans on Southern plantations,” Disney officials noted about “Dumbo” on its streaming platform. “The leader of the group in Dumbo is Jim Crow, which shares the name of laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States,” the statement continued. 

Maintaining the Meaning of Juneteenth: Staying Focused on Freedom

The celebration of freedom is to be encouraged and applauded everywhere and all the time, and the celebration of Juneteenth, June 19th as Emancipation Day, is, of necessity, no exception. For freedom is so essential to our lives, our concepts of ourselves and our understanding of what it means to live and flourish as human beings. In this context, Min. Malcolm X makes freedom the most essential value in his ethical insistence on freedom, justice and equality as non-negotiable needs and rights of the human person. Thus, he states that “freedom is essential to life itself” and equally, “freedom is essential to the development of the human being.” Moreover, he says, “if we don’t have freedom we can never expect justice and equality.” For “only after we have freedom, does justice and equality become a reality.” 

Maintaining the Meaning of Juneteenth: Staying Focused on Freedom

It is this ethical insight and emphasis on the priority of human freedom as the condition and context for justice, equality and human flourishing that leads Min. Malcolm to argue the right to pursue and achieve “freedom by any means necessary.” This phrase is not a claim to do even the unethical but is a cornerstone in his ethics of self-defense against oppression, his reaffirmation of the right of resistance and his call for a courageous commitment to give all that’s necessary to be free men and women, and stand upright and worthy among persons, peoples and nations of the world.

Black Men and Women Rising: Resurrection After Social Death

We have come again to a beautiful and hopeful time: Spring, the promise of new and renewed life; Easter and conversations, imaginations and initiatives of resurrection, renewal, repeating life, “coming forth by day” and rising in radiance into the heavens and afterlife. The concept of resurrection has a long and rich history in the spirituality, ethics and social teachings of African people. It is both a spiritual and social-ethical concept in the intellectual genealogy and social history of Black thought and offers us lessons on how to live and die and rise up and live again.