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.
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.”
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article by Charles Bolden via vanityfair.com
When I was growing up, in segregated South Carolina, African-American role models in national life were few and far between. Later, when my fellow flight students and I, in training at the Naval Air Station in Meridian, Mississippi, clustered around a small television watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, little did I know that one of the key figures responsible for its success was an unassuming black woman from West Virginia: Katherine Johnson.
Hidden Figures is both an upcoming book and an upcoming movie about her incredible life, and, as the title suggests, Katherine worked behind the scenes but with incredible impact. When Katherine began at NASA, she and her cohorts were known as “human computers,” and if you talk to her or read quotes from throughout her long career, you can see that precision, that humming mind, constantly at work. She is a human computer, indeed, but one with a quick wit, a quiet ambition, and a confidence in her talents that rose above her era and her surroundings.
“In math, you’re either right or you’re wrong,” she said. Her succinct words belie a deep curiosity about the world and dedication to her discipline, despite the prejudices of her time against both women and African-Americans. It was her duty to calculate orbital trajectories and flight times relative to the position of the moon—you know, simple things. In this day and age, when we increasingly rely on technology, it’s hard to believe that John Glenn himself tasked Katherine to double-check the results of the computer calculations before his historic orbital flight, the first by an American. The numbers of the human computer and the machine matched.
To read full article, go to: Katherine Johnson, the NASA Mathematician Who Advanced Human Rights with a Slide Rule and Pencil | Vanity Fair
article by Yohana Desta via vanityfair.com
In 1991, Julie Dash’s sumptuous film “Daughters of the Dust” broke ground as the first movie directed by a black woman to get a wide theatrical release. Since then, the gorgeous tone poem about a Gullah family in 1902 has continued to gather accolades. It was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2004, and recently served as a heavy inspiration for Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade.
Now, the film is being re-introduced to the mainstream in a splashy new way—the Cohen Media Group has created a rich 2K restoration that will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, then released in theaters again this November. (Watch the exclusive new trailer above to see the film restored in all its fresh, new glory, and scroll down to see the glossy new poster.)
Dash calls the new release “exciting.”“I never imagined it would be released again,” she says. For the record, Dash is also a huge fan of Lemonade—and says that the visual album actually helped Daughters on the road to restoration. Read on to see her thoughts about Beyoncé, Hollywood, and whether she’d ever make a sequel to her classic film.
Vanity Fair: Were you paying attention at all to Lemonade, to the Beyoncé film?
Julie Dash: Yes. My phone blew up the night Lemonade came on and my Web site shut down . . . someone called me and said Daughters of the Dust is trending on Twitter. And I said, “No, it must be something else,” and they said, “No, it’s trending!” And I looked and it was, and it was so funny. It just tickled me to death. So I finally got a chance to see Lemonade and I was just very pleased. Lemonade is just—it breaks new ground. It’s a masterpiece.It’s a tone poem, a visual tone poem with various stories going on—vignettes. It’s just all visual, and it’s like yes.
To read full interview and see the “Daughters of the Dust” trailer, go to: How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Helped Bring a Groundbreaking Film Back to Thea | Vanity Fair
article via thegrio.com
Next May, entrepreneur, television producer and former supermodel Tyra Banks will be teaching students at Stanford University how to grow their brand and manage their own businesses. Banks will be a guest lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and she will co-teach 25 MBA students in the course about the ups and downs of the business world, which will require students to present their brands across platforms including YouTube, Facebook Live, and local television.
Banks told the Wall Street Journal that she expects her students to work hard, saying, “If I see somebody not paying attention, I’m gonna call on them.”
Source: Tyra Banks becomes a professor at Stanford University | theGrio
article by Angela Bronner Helms via theroot.com
The home occupied by one of the great leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, still stands on 127th Street in Harlem today. Hughes used the top floor of the home as his workroom from 1947 to his death in 1967; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
The current owner, who remains anonymous, listed the unoccupied dwelling for $1 million (which still has his typerwriter on a shelf) a few years ago, but it did not sell. CNN Money reports that in a rapidly gentrifying New York, the home is now worth over $3 million.
Now that it’s on the market, writer Renee Watson has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise $150,000 to rent the home and turn it into a cultural center.
Over 250 people, many of them black writers, have given money in support and so far, the initiative to save Hughes’ house has raised almost $34,000. “Hughes is deeply influential and important not only to me, but many writers of color,” says author Jacqueline Woodson, winner of the National Book Award for Brown Girl Dreaming, which opens with a Hughes poem.
Watson says she has spoken to the owner, who says she would definitely sell it, but “like me, she doesn’t want it to become condos or a coffee shop.”
To donate to the fund, please go to the I, Too, Arts Collective Indigogo page.
To read full article, go to: Black Writers Rally To Save Langston Hughes Home
article by Samara Lynn via blackenterprise.com
Nat Cummings is a talented computer hacker using his skills to pay his college tuition. A covert operative, he is well-versed in hacking, hand-to-hand combat, blade combat, and stealth.All is well with Nat until he is listed as a
n International Terror Threat, Code Red.
The newly formed government/paramilitary organization called The Establishment gives 
him a simple choice, either work with them to become a highly trained assassin or be terminated. Nat is the protagonist of a new science fiction comic book series, P.B. Soldier. The series not only promises an exciting story of an African American antihero, but it is designed to teach STEM skills.
P.B. Soldier is the brainchild of PBS Media, an independent comic book publisher founded by Naseed Gifted.
Gifted is not only the comic’s writer and creator he is a long-time math teacher, was an engineer, and is currently an administrator for the Pre-Academy division of the New Jersey Public Schools system.
Today, PBS Media is launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise $8,500 for the production of episode 3.0, the sixth installment of a 13 book arc. Funds will go toward payment to line artist and colorist Abel Garcia, and the actual production of the book, including printing and distribution.
A portion of proceeds will go to the Central High School PreEngineering Academy in Newark, New Jersey, where Gifted has taught and led for the past 13 years.
To read full article, go to: New Jersey Educator Launches STEM Comic Book
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.
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.
article by Niraj Chokshi via nytimes.com
New York City has agreed to pay more than $4 million to the family of Akai Gurley, the unarmed man killed in a Brooklyn housing project in 2014 by a police officer on patrol, according to a lawyer for Mr. Gurley’s family.
The city will pay the bulk of the settlement, $4.1 million, said Scott Rynecki, who represents Mr. Gurley’s domestic partner, Kimberly Ballinger, and their 4-year-old daughter, Akaila Gurley. The New York City Housing Authority will pay an additional $400,000, and the officer, Peter Liang, will pay $25,000, Mr. Rynecki said.
The settlement, reported by The Daily News, was finalized on Monday afternoon by Justice Dawn M. Jimenez-Salta of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, after two months of negotiations. Efforts to reach a lawyer for Mr. Liang and the city’s Law Department late Monday were unsuccessful.
Mr. Gurley was killed on Nov. 20, 2014, by a ricocheting bullet fired by Mr. Liang, who was on a night patrol in a dark stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood.
To read full article, go to: nytimes.com/2016/08/16/nyregion/new-york-city-to-pay-4-1-million-to-family-of-akai-gurley.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1&referer=https://t.co/SpMejO12oM
article by Mallika Rao via villagevoice.com
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
article by Hadassah Egdebi via venturesafrica.com
The invention of a secondary school student has gotten Namibia’s social media abuzz for the right reasons. Simon Petrus has created a mobile phone that works with radio frequencies, no sim card nor airtime credit required. Calls can be made to anyone, anywhere, without interruptions, as long as they are done in an area with radio frequency.
The invention, which took two years for him to complete, was put together using scraps of old television and mobile phones, and required over $2,000 funding from his unemployed parents who sacrificed a lot to ensure their son’s project was successful.
Other than the sim-less phone, Petrus’ invention is a whole unit comprising of a working radio, television, a light bulb, a fan, and a socket. According to reports, the phone is not Petrus’ first invention, just his latest.
Last year, the young man won first place at a competition for young innovators in Namibia for creating a machine that doubles as a seed drier and a cooler. Going by the looks of things, this young man is set to clinch another gold medal in the forthcoming competition, having already won first place at the regional level for his “free-to-call” phone last Friday. “When he won last year, some judges were of the opinion that there was an engineer at home who was helping him. But the only help he has is from us the teachers here at school. He came up with his own project,” Taimi Vatileni, Petrus’s science teacher told New Era.
To read more, go to: A teenager from Namibia invents a “sim-less” and “airtime-free” phone – Ventures Africa