Legendary actress Cicely Tyson is adding more awards to her repertoire.
The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Incorporated (CBCF) recently announced that the 91-year-old actress will be a recipient of a lifetime achievement award in the arts. Tyson will also be joined by “Being Mary Jane” actor Richard Roundtree and music icon Dionne Warwick during the foundation’s 20th Annual Celebration of Leadership in the Fine Arts.
“With a lifetime of entertaining and educating us, this year’s honorees have also distinguished themselves as remarkable leaders and passionate advocates for the arts and arts education,” said CBCF president and CEO A. Shuanise Washington in a press release.
“Their outstanding contributions and continuing commitment to the arts make them ideal to help elevate the visibility of the CBC Spouses Visual and Performance Arts Scholarship Program. The awards are conferred on artists whose legacy includes not only extraordinary works but a commitment to cultivating future generations of artists.”
The awards ceremony, which will take place Sept. 14 in Washington, D.C., is organized in cooperation with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Spouses Visual and Performance Arts Scholarship program, Shadow and Act noted.
The House of Cards and How To Get Away With Murder guest star is no stranger to recognition.
During Tyson’s illustrious 65-year career, she has won an Emmy, a Tony, a SAG and a Drama Desk Award for her work in television, film and on and Off-Broadway. She has also been nominated for a Golden Globe, Academy Award and BAFTA to name a few. And just recently, it was announced that the American Theatre Wing will honor Tyson at its annual Gala September 26 at The Plaza Hotel.
Asnath Mahapa is South Africa’s first African female pilot. (photo via cnn.com) article by Hira Humayan, Amanda Sealy, CNN and Phoebe Parke, for CNN via cnn.com Asnath Mahapa was fascinated by planes as a teenager, little did she know she would break boundaries with them by becoming South Africa’s first African female pilot.
“It just dawned on me that those big things that we see in the skies, someone is actually in charge of them,” she told CNN. “I thought if someone can fly this thing, that means I can also do it.”
Mahapa, whose father didn’t want her to become a pilot, overcame a number of obstacles before she took to the skies. “When I told my father I wanted to become a pilot, he never even entertained the idea, ” she explained.
Challenging route to success
She enrolled in a course in electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town in line with her father’s wishes, only to drop out a year later. She later started flight school, which came with it’s own set of challenges.
“I was the only woman in my class the whole time,” she said. “I had to work very hard. I had to probably work ten times harder than the men that I was with in the classroom.”
Mahapa also felt sick the first few times she took to the skies. But that didn’t stop her. “My first time, I felt sick,” she said. “I was persistent, I went back again, I went back until I stopped feeling sick.”
Her hard work and determination paid off and in 1998 she broke barriers by taking to the skies as the first female African pilot in South Africa.
“I didn’t know I was the first black woman until 2003, until about four years later. And I was still the only one at the time and I did not know,” she said. “Before I knew it I was on TV, front page of newspapers, and that came as a shock because I was still young, I was 22 at the time, I was very young.”
Charting a new course
Mahapa was not content with just breaking barriers, she wanted to train and inspire a new generation of pilots, so in 2012 she opened the African College of Aviation.
“For me, it’s about trying to help women who aspire to become pilots,” she said. “I still see a lot of black women going through the same things that I went through at that time. They still struggle to get jobs after they qualify.
“Most of them they struggle with finances because it’s a very expensive industry.” In addition to cost, according to Mahapa the field is still very male dominated, something she is committed to change.
(photo via takepart.com) article via jbhe.com
The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it will build a new African American Center on campus. The center will be named after Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi-born voting and civil rights activist. Fannie Lou Hamer (photo via socialfeed.info)
The agreement to establish the center comes after a year of talks among the administration, the Black Student Union and other campus African American groups.
The university has allocated more than $80,000 to refurbish the space for the new center in the Hearst Field Annex. Na’ilah Nasir, vice chancellor for equity and inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, stated that “it’s a big deal for our students to know that our administration understands their needs and supports them. It’s a financially constrained time, but it’s also a time when the administration is thinking about its priorities and values. I think the students should be encouraged that the center is something the campus will really support.”
Brothers Sulaiman Lee, Leone’s Darealest and Noel Kerr (l-r) aim to boost the self-esteem of black children through books. (photo via voice-online.co.uk)
article by Rianna Raymond-Williams via voice-online.co.uk
Three brothers from Tottenham, North London, are on a mission to raise the self-esteem of African Caribbean children through books.
Sulaiman Lee, Noel Kerr and Leonegus Darealest are the trio behind Black Child Promotions, which aims to give children a positive view of their identity through the works of a range of authors.
The men hope to give young people access to knowledge about prominent black figures such Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King, Jr., successful black empires and movements, African Caribbean fables and folk stories as well as the writings of influential black political leaders.
One of the trio, Lee, told The Voice: “We have titles from the likes of Maya Angelou to Iyanla Vanzant to Amos N. Wilson and Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan. We have something for everyone, children’s stories, political books, poetry, autobiographies and more.”
He added: “For us, Black History isn’t just for one month, it’s all year round and that’s exactly what we want to show people. We believe we need to promote black history more, as it isn’t something we see widely in the media or something that our children are learning about at school.”
The trio has recently set up a stall outside Brixton tube station and another one outside Stratford tube station in a bid to reach as many people as they can and engage them about the importance of reading.
However their main location for the last 12 years has been in Seven Sisters, north London.
Before becoming involved with books, the three men sold educational DVDs outside Seven Sisters tube station. Among the titles they sold were the acclaimed documentary series Hidden Colors by Tariq Nasheed and films about influential figures such as Malcolm X.
Kim Drew has been photographed in all shades of lipstick.Chalk-white, indigo — like she’s just had a Slurpee. When she walked into the Black Art Incubator on a recent Thursday, it was with red lips and a navy dress fit for a tennis court. At her chest hung a white pipe fragment, bought in Miami. “I wish I could remember the artist who made it,” she fretted when I admired the necklace.
She looked punk and prep, red-white-and-blue speared with a pipe. It’s a tension that shapes Drew’s work. She runs social media for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she’s credited with starting a slow-burn revolution via Tumblr, arguably the lowest-fi gallery there is. Her high-traffic account Black Contemporary Art — a simple visual catalog of work by black artists — operates on the premise that black artists have been left out of art history. She slots them in without bitterness. “It’s either that people are recorded, or they’re not,” she tells me matter-of-factly.
That same current of low-key, savvy correction undergirds the Black Art Incubator, Drew’s new project, birthed with three other black women also in their twenties. Billed as a “social sculpture,” the incubator takes blackness — and all that racial identifier suggests about what a person might know or feel — as a given. To see the space as a critique, Drew says, is reductive. The project isn’t so much oppositional as an inversion of what we tend to expect. “Most art institutions are rooted in whiteness, but it’s implied, it’s this normalized thing,” she says. With the project, “we’re normalizing being rooted in blackness without beating people over the head with it.”
Drew and her co-founders — Jessica Bell Brown, an art historian, and Jessica Lynne and Taylor Renee Aldridge, both art writers — took a year to build the space and its offerings. “We still have a running group text,” Drew notes wryly. “It’s very internet. Very 2016.”
In practice, it wends a little 1960s. The incubator lives through August 19 at Recess, a residency space on the Lower East Side. The feel is of a secret clubhouse, convivial with an insider edge. You get the sense that while anyone is welcome, Berkeley coffeehouse–style, there’s more fun to be had if you’re part of the group. At quieter times, those anxieties recede; the space charms. A bench hugs the front window. Plants flare against white walls. Ginger cookies, mint tea, and a soulful Spotify playlist are all on tap.
Black Art Incubator
Recess
41 Grand Street
646-863-3765, recessart.org
Through August 19
During structured hours, there are sessions: Talks fall into two genres (“art and money” or “archive”), while “office hours” and “open crits” mimic MFA programming — but with the expectation that “you know who Richard Wright is,” as the legendary East Village artist Sur Rodney (Sur), who recently gave a talk, puts it to me via phone. The incubator interests him for how it overturns expectations of knowledge, eschewing the usual canon in favor of one not often taught in schools. “There’s a certain standard, a bibliography of material that we’ve all had to study,” he says, citing Moby Dick and Charles Dickens. On top of playing that game, people of color “have to do all this other research to understand where they fit in.” Joshua Moton, a cellist who performed at an open crit last month, has experienced this firsthand. He explains the bodily discomfort his training in the European classical tradition gave him. In college, he found jazz. “Coltrane, Ayler, Silva, Davis,” he says. “I was able to heal,” to find “parts of the cello that I never really thought were there.” While crits are known as stress-bombs in academia, Moton says his — led by Adrienne Edwards, the dynamic curator-at-large of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, clad in metallic pants — felt like a “safe space.”
Therapeutic spaces face similar accusations as art schools over what their members tend to assume about their peers, whether to do with money, access, or personal history, and the incubator also addresses those issues. Moton, for one, returned the next day for a meditation hour. Here, too, he felt a difference. He drew a contrast for me, mentioning a yoga class he recently attended in which an Australian woman near him went on about “wage slaves,” throwing off his balance. “What does it mean to have a black space?” he asked. “When you can be a black person and breathe and not feel off.” To read full article, go to: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/black-art-incubator-aims-to-invert-art-world-normal-8960371
Carlos Miller and Chris Bentley, founders of Live FRESH Palm Beach County. (photo via palmbeachpost.com) article by Angela Bronner Helm via theroot.com Chris Bentley and Carlos Miller, two African-American men who have been friends since middle school, have started an innovative way to help the homeless of Palm Beach County, Fla. The two started a nonprofit—Live FRESH (Feeling Revitalized Encourages Sustainable Happiness)—and have launched a mobile shower facility, an air conditioned trailer equipped with six private shower/changing area rooms, to assist the area’s transient population.
The Palm Beach Post reports that the two chose showers specifically: “For us, that’s where dignity and self-respect starts … with the ability to stay clean and be presentable,” says Bentley. “Cleanliness is a fundamental need. We actually see it as basic human right and because the homeless population can be hard to reach, we knew we would have to come to them and make ourselves available in areas they could easily reach.”
Miller writes on the website: “To see a human being, living in the United States of all countries, walk inside a store with apprehension over being shunned or offensive to the atmosphere due to their odor or disheveled state grabbed at the core of my heart.”About 250 people have participated since the program began March 31, reports the Post.
Each participant gets a packet with personal hygiene essentials including deodorant, towels, soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss. The organization was able to launch its fund with a $100,000 grant from Impact the Palm Beaches and smaller donations from other organizations. To read full article and see video, go to: Longtime Friends Start Mobile Shower Facility for the Homeless in Fla.
Halle Berry is using fashion to fight for a great cause.
The actress is teaming up with Saks Fifth Avenue, Stand Up to Cancer and the Entertainment Industry Foundation for the Key to the Cure campaign.
Signing on as the official ambassador for the cause, Berry will be rocking an exclusive limited-edition T-shirt designed by Christian Louboutin in the campaign images.
“I, like so many others, have been touched by cancer, which is why I’m proud to continue to lend my support to the Entertainment Industry Foundation and Stand Up to Cancer in serving as this year’s Key to the Cure ambassador,” Berry, 49, said in a statement. “I hope everyone will join me in supporting this critical cause by purchasing a Key to the Cure T-shirt.” To read more, go to: http://www.essence.com/2016/08/04/halle-berry-teams-christian-louboutin-saks-t-shirt-line-cause
Rashad Robinson, Color of Change executive director, delivers the petition to the Department of Justice on Aug. 3, 2016. (Screenshot courtesy of ColorOfChange.org, via Twitter) article by Yessenia Funes via colorlines.com
A cohort of racial justice and civil rights organizations delivered a petition advocating for major police reforms to the Department of Justice this afternoon. With more than 500,000 signatures, the petition urges the White House to defund police departments that reject community-based reforms. It also calls for justice in the fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Color of Change, which led the effort, partnered with Advancement Project, BYP100, the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, Black Lives Matter and the NAACP for a 2 p.m. press conference.
The petition reads:
Our criminal justice system is not properly holding police accountable. We must defund police departments that employ officers who are quick to kill and condone practices that do not value Black life. Our nation, politicians and many police are in agreement that police departments need reform, however, no one is ensuring this reform happens—and more and more Black people are getting killed because of it.
PHOTO CREDIT: ERIK MCGREGOR/PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES article by Amber Mckynzie via essence.com Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean only Black people think black lives matter. And New York’s Jewish community proved that last Thursday when Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) marched and rallied in the name of BLM in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.
According to ParkSlopeStoop.com, JFREJ held a successful and peaceful rally “protest police violence against people of color, and demand police accountability through the passage of the City Council’s Right To Know Act.”
Beginning at Jay Z’s formerly-owned Barclay’s Center, Yehudah Webster, JFREJ member and leader of Jews of Color, began a call and response chant on his microphone. “Even though we are angry at the injustice of police brutality,” Webster said, and the crowd responded, “we gather here for love, for lost brothers and sisters, our communities and each other.”
JFREJ explained why they were marching by saying, “Jews say Black Lives Matter not only because we know what it is to be oppressed, but also because police violence against Black people is deeply personal for Black members of the Jewish community.”Take a look at the march moving from Brooklyn to New York’s Bond street below. ParkSlopeStoop.com also reports that while also rallying to let people know Black Jews Matter, protestors also “called for the fair passage of the Right to Know Act, which has two primary components: “Requiring NYPD officers to identify themselves” (Intro 182) and “Protecting New Yorkers against unconstitutional searches” (Intro 541).” Source: Jewish Community Holds Black Lives Matter Rally in New York | Essence.com
T.I.’s TIDAL x Money Talk & Education Challenge has paid off in a huge and inspiring way for youth across the globe.
The initiative, which was first announced in May, encouraged young people to submit proposals detailing their plans to promote educational awareness within their communities through on and offline education-based fundraising efforts. The contest ran from May 4 through June 15.
According to a press release from TIDAL, 86 participants got involved for their chance to win the challenge and T.I. will now keep his promise by matching the $35,000 in funds raised by the six finalists selected. T.I.’s $35K combined with the $46K+ that was raised by all 86 challenge participants brings the total amount donated through the TIDAL x Money Talk Education Challenge to more than $81,000.
Details on the six finalists’ organizations are as follows: Fate Loves The Fearless – Education and mentorship program to help Detroit youth excel in school; funds raised will go towards the renovation of a new facility. Shaw Inspires “Teen-Preneurs”– In-school, after school, weekend and summer mentoring and leadership program for youth ages 11-25; funds raised will help the program expand to Baltimore and Charleston. The Musicianship’s 2016 Summer Camp – Summer camp that provides music lessons for young people; funds will be used to buy instruments, supplies, support music instructors, and provide a college scholarship. Generation You Employed – Program that helps the unemployed youth with skills and job readiness in five countries (Kenya, India, Spain, Mexico and the United States); they plan to train one million unemployed young people and place them in jobs by 2020; funds raised will go towards expanding into Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. To read full article, go to: http://www.essence.com/2016/07/28/ti-donates-35k-to-education-entrepreneurship-programs
