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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Black Lives Matter / Sunday Evening Open Thread: Wrapping Up Black History Month

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Wrapping Up Black History Month

by Anne Laurie|  February 27, 20226:22 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Black Lives Matter, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Racial Justice, Russia

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This here ?????? pic.twitter.com/qBjQCJFBP9

— Geneva H. (@shesthebaglady) February 23, 2022

Short end of the stick, as always… but the battle continues.

The Emancipator newspaper was established in 1820 to push for the abolition of slavery. Two centuries later, it's being revived in digital form to confront the racism that still stains America. https://t.co/VBjnKmykHw

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 23, 2022

Standing nearly 14 feet tall and 30 feet wide, the Legacy Quilt — part of the Museum of Food and Drink’s (MOFAD) latest exhibit, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” — includes 406 tiles that illustrate Black people’s impact on American cuisine. https://t.co/c9yLA3YG3B

— Victoria (@AVocalistsRival) February 26, 2022

NEW YORK — Upon entering Aliko Dangote Hall at the Africa Center, you’re immediately confronted with the breadth and scope of the role African Americans have played in shaping our country’s food and beverage. Standing nearly 14 feet tall and 30 feet wide, the Legacy Quilt — part of the Museum of Food and Drink’s (MOFAD) latest exhibit, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” — includes 406 tiles that illustrate Black people’s impact on American cuisine.

“We’re in a few thousand square feet and we’re trying to tell 400 years of history. How do we do that?” said Catherine Piccoli, the museum’s curatorial director, on the process of assembling the exhibit. “We discussed early on the concept of a quilt — since quilts are so deeply rooted in African American culture — being part of the exhibition, and as we continued to talk about the quilt it became the sort of holding place, if you will, for telling as many stories as we could.”

Scheduled to run through June 19, a.k.a. Juneteenth, the first-of-its-kind exhibit puts Black people’s culinary contributions in agriculture, culinary arts, brewing and distilling, and commerce on full display and allows guests to see, experience and taste — yes, there is food available — the results. In addition to the quilt, it includes the Ebony Test Kitchen, a bastion of African American cuisine that was saved from demolition by preservation nonprofit Landmarks Illinois, along with photographs, artifacts and virtual reality experiences…

The Legacy Quilt was sewn by Harlem Needle Arts and features illustrations by graphic designer Adrian Franks. “The idea was to find 400 people, one for every year for the 400 years that were initially being celebrated when we were opening in 2020, which would have taken us from 1619 to 2020,” Harris said, referring to the year enslaved Africans were first brought to America. “There are blank quilt squares to indicate the number of people that we just don’t know and that are being discovered daily.”…

The 1977 TV miniseries ‘Roots,’ based on Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is being re-released to celebrate its 45th anniversary https://t.co/gamuhpZBQq pic.twitter.com/OoP45rP4Ce

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 26, 2022

“We want to make sure that America’s story is told from the folks who have not always been invited to the table, who have not always had a say in what their own history has been.” https://t.co/qO0xRpiukq

— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) February 20, 2022

The first time I saw Deb Haaland cry, she was a congresswoman from New Mexico, and she was standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

It was 2019, during a civil rights pilgrimage led by John Lewis. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) wailed out as a hymn was sung, and Haaland reached to comfort her. It was impossible not to be moved standing with Lewis on the bridge where he was almost killed in 1965.

So it wasn’t a surprise to watch tears well this week for Haaland, now the interior secretary, as she stood outside the Mississippi courthouse that once set free the murderers of Emmett Till. For Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, visiting these sites doesn’t just mean remembering the injustice inflicted upon Black people; it means walking the ancestral lands that were home to Indigenous people long before the slave ships came. Long before the boundaries between the races were drawn, and then reinforced by Jim Crow. She knows what it means to come from people who experienced prejudice and violence — the kind of violence that killed Till when he was just 14 years old.

A 2017 act of Congress spurred the current effort to incorporate existing sites that honor the history of Till’s 1955 lynching into the National Park Service, and it’s what brought Haaland to the Mississippi Delta to listen. What she heard was pain from a community that wants Till’s story told truthfully…

This is your annual Black History Month reminder that Russia's most important poet, who has done for our literary language what Shakespeare has done for English, was a black man who was arrested and exiled for his political views and ultimately slain by a white officer. pic.twitter.com/qt0ELzbJod

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) February 2, 2022

Alexander Pushkin's proud black heritage is a source of endless butthurt for a certain subset of Russians that is NEVER not fun to irritate.
"The Negroes' ugly descendant" himself would've been giddy with merriment, I tell you.

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) February 2, 2022

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Reader Interactions

26Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    February 27, 2022 at 6:39 pm

    I like how you found a way to tie Black History Month with current events.

  2. 2.

    eclare

    February 27, 2022 at 6:39 pm

    That quilt would be amazing to see.  Did anyone watch High on the Hog on Netflix?

  3. 3.

    debbie

    February 27, 2022 at 6:40 pm

    That mural up top!  ? ? ?

  4. 4.

    different-church-lady

    February 27, 2022 at 6:46 pm

    I hereby decree the other eleven months of the year “Stop Shitting on Black People Months.”

  5. 5.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    February 27, 2022 at 6:49 pm

    “Killing Eve” returns to BBC America and AMC tonight​

  6. 6.

    Martin

    February 27, 2022 at 6:55 pm

    Kosovo asks to join NATO and requests a permanent US base there.

    Russia probably just bought themselves a lot of permanent US bases on their western border.

  7. 7.

    Yarrow

    February 27, 2022 at 7:01 pm

    Seems appropriate that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court in February.

  8. 8.

    zhena gogolia

    February 27, 2022 at 7:01 pm

    I love that Pushkin tweet!

  9. 9.

    Another Scott

    February 27, 2022 at 7:06 pm

    @debbie: Indeed.  It is amazing.

    CNN story

    Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  10. 10.

    eclare

    February 27, 2022 at 7:12 pm

    @Yarrow:  It is perfect!

  11. 11.

    MC

    February 27, 2022 at 7:13 pm

    Any elders on here have advice on how to remain sane during something like this? I’m much too young to have had any experience.

  12. 12.

    Jimmy T

    February 27, 2022 at 7:15 pm

    I really like this video. Trends well with black history month…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQOaUnSmJr8

  13. 13.

    Martin

    February 27, 2022 at 7:18 pm

    And I dedicate this Black History Month, like the last 20 or so Black History Months to my cousin who I didn’t learn of until I was well into adulthood. My aunt met a black man, which was very much a bridge too far for my racist Irish family, and upon learning she was pregnant was whisked away to California by her mother, along with all the other kids save my dad, who was then in the Navy (chasing Soviet subs around the Atlantic). She put her newborn daughter up for adoption, and was adopted by a wonderful family here in Southern California. After I had gotten married, my aunt came out to California to meet up with her daughter after they sought each other out, and I was finally told the story and got to meet her. She’s wonderful, of course, and a district attorney, and as it turns out she went to high school with a good friend of ours, so he knows her better than I do (I’m catching up).

    Every black American has a story to tell, full of good and bad. Nobody escapes white nationalism entirely, even from their own family. In the end she has a good story to tell. A good husband, two great kids, a fantastic career, all that. But there wasn’t a foundation laid for that to happen. The odds were stacked against her, despite the good steps (if perhaps insufficient – I wasn’t there, I was in the process of being born myself) my branch of the family took.

    I wish I had known her as a kid. Had someone to play with when I came out to visit, as we are the same age. I was robbed of time with my cousin, and I’m angry about that.

    So that’s my story of how my family came to California. Expelled by our relatives because we fell in love with a black man and had a child. And my estranged family has gotten a little better, but this is the legacy they helped build, and they did a LOT of the lifting on that legacy. My family is not a minor player, what with having headed up the FDNY union and all that.

  14. 14.

    Miss Bianca

    February 27, 2022 at 7:23 pm

    @debbie:  After my sister died my niece was putting up photos on FB with her. The family portrait – sis, her daughter, and her granddaughter – in front of the Tubman mural was amazing.

  15. 15.

    Martin

    February 27, 2022 at 7:27 pm

    @MC: Yeah, it’s hard.

    Probably the thing to keep in mind is that this sense of imminent threat of nuclear war was the status quo for like 30 years. And nothing happened.

    This is why I call Republicans cowards. They’ve been screeching from 1992 until 2016 that they needed a fucking arsenal of weapons to halt tyranny and then when someone like Obama shows up that they openly call tyrannical, they do nothing. Either they’re lying, or they’re cowards, or both. I mean, they went to DC to overthrow the government but were still too nervous about getting arrested breaking DCs firearm ordinance.

    The Soviets/Russia have been able to nuke the target of their choice with no warning since 1957. Same with the US. Nobody needs to threaten their use, we all know they’re there ready to go. Use of them would make you a permanent pariah, and probably get you a personalized Minuteman III. There’s no upside for anyone.

    But scaring the citizenry, that’s useful. That’s Fox News’ fucking business model.

  16. 16.

    Salty Sam

    February 27, 2022 at 7:39 pm

    @Martin:   I love this story Martin. A situation born in shame, that matured into pride…  I’m sure there are many more like it, and look forward to the day when they could be shared more freely.

    re: the quilt-  very early in my first career (professional chef), I took a job in a hotel where I was the only white boy in the kitchen.  As beautiful as it is, I don’t need a quilt to remind me the contributions of African Americans to our culinary palette- I lived it daily for years. Milton, Robert, Joanie, and many others taught me SO much more than I could have learned from culinary school.  It is one of my greatest regrets that I didn’t make the time to catch up with Milton before he passed.  In many ways, he was like a father to me.

  17. 17.

    Ohio Mom

    February 27, 2022 at 8:16 pm

    @MC: You have to mentally/emotionally compartmentalize.

    You can google that for more details, it’s basically just recognizing there is something disturbing in your life and consciously putting it aside so you can get things done.

    It’s one of those defense mechanisms that can be harnessed productively if you are intentional about it. It’s not denial because you are owning it.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    February 27, 2022 at 8:22 pm

    Alexander Pushkin’s proud black heritage is a source of endless butthurt for a certain subset of Russians that is NEVER not fun to irritate.

    I noted in a previous thread that I alway thought that Prince looked a lot like Pushkin.

    ETA. I also note that on of the things that I enjoy about the HBO series The Gilded Age is its depiction of the black community in 19th century Brooklyn.

    Communities of color are rarely depicted in movies about previous eras of American history, apart from episodes about racist oppression.

  19. 19.

    Brachiator

    February 27, 2022 at 8:36 pm

    Wikipedia recently featured an article about Patrick Healey whose life is emblematic of the insanity of racism in America. He and his notable siblings often had been identified as Irish American.

    Patrick Francis Healy, SJ (February 27, 1834 – January 10, 1910) was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its “second founder”. The university’s flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was largely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to become a Jesuit, earn a PhD, and become the president of a predominantly White university.

    Healy was born in Georgia to a family that produced many Catholic leaders. His mother was one-eighth Black and his father was a White Irish emigrant. Under Georgia law, Healy’s father technically owned his wife and children as slaves. Healy and his siblings were sent north by their father to be educated, and Healy continued his higher education at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1864. He returned to America and started as the chair of philosophy at Georgetown University….

    Patrick and all of his siblings were born as slaves, as by the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, they inherited the legal status of their mother. Michael Healy was prevented by Georgia law from manumitting his wife or children, which could be done only by an act of the Georgia General Assembly in exceptional circumstances.

    It was also against the law in the state to educate blacks, which is why the children had to be sent North.

  20. 20.

    Felanius Kootea

    February 27, 2022 at 8:52 pm

    @eclare: Yes – I loved High on the Hog! Learned so much and cried at the point in Benin when the host choked up.

  21. 21.

    Honus

    February 27, 2022 at 8:53 pm

    @Salty Sam: yep. As white kid from an all white town in West Virginia I learned a whole lot about and formed many lasting friendships with Black people working as a line cook in college and the years after.

  22. 22.

    prostratedragon

    February 27, 2022 at 9:34 pm

    Thank you for that. I descend from a family of Martins that is rooted in Ireland (and France) and Africa. The story of how they got together is unlikely to be an achingly bittersweet tale of thwarted romance, but nevertheless here I am, and so be it. I’m glad you and your cousin have had a chance to know each other, and that she had a happy landing.

  23. 23.

    MC

    February 27, 2022 at 9:56 pm

    @Martin: Thanks for this. I know it’s true. And I’m working on some radical acceptance. I’m grateful to have Biden as president, too. I don’t think we could have had anyone better suited for this.

  24. 24.

    Ruckus

    February 27, 2022 at 10:35 pm

    @MC:

    How do you maintain sanity in a world wide man made disaster?

    Not sure you can. But you can decide not to go off the deep end because that what there is. Most Americans have not had to experience a level of “Holy Shit” that we are quite possibly at this next few days. Likely most people haven’t had that experience. But some have and have come through it. I’ve met some at the VA. There are far more people than one might imagine who have come through a rather severe “Holy Shit” moment in their lives and they survived at least approaching fine. There is little to actually do in this case, except wait and hope that saner minds prevail. If you can, donate to some of the sources listed in the War in Ukraine link in the blue bar at the top. Read this thread and see that while we have a ways to go to good, this nation has gotten better. Progress in human terms is often slow and painful but progress is possible. But you have to keep looking forward and working at it.

    That’s all I’ve got.

  25. 25.

    Hoppie

    February 27, 2022 at 11:37 pm

    As Obama said, we are striving for a more perfect union.

    Thank you for posting, there is still much to be hopeful about.

  26. 26.

    Kayla Rudbek

    February 28, 2022 at 11:38 am

    More discussion of Baker’s List

    at the US Patent and Trademark Office Facebook page. I really hope that the USPTO historian keeps going with his research.

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