Big Sole Blog (BSB)

President Obama spoke at the White House today about the Trayvon Martin case saying that 35 years ago, he could have been Trayvon. He said what he had to say diplomatically, making this salient point: . . . [W]hen you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American

Reading a post about Savannah's history at Examiner.com, I discovered a link to a video in which Paula Deen, appearing on the finale of NBC's Who Do You Think You Are? last year, discovered that her great-great-grandfather, John Batts, owned 35 slaves. Deen had denied for years, she says, that her family ever had anything to do with slavery; however, she did not seem particularly shocked

Zora Neale Hurston, renowned African-American author, folklorist, and anthropologist, really knew how to put a spin on her life. I suspect her philosophy was never reveal vulnerability. It's public knowledge that Zora died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave. (The beautiful Alice Walker went in search of her grave in the 70s and put a symbolic marker in the general area of Zora's

In this video, A.P. Tureaud Jr. (son of the famous Civil Rights attorney) and Louisiana historian Alfred E. Lemmon discuss the musical history of Louisiana's free people of color. Their information is pretty accurate. For instance, it's true that prior to the cultural Americanization of Louisiana and before the Civil War, Louisiana neighborhoods were not as segregated as they became later.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy In the video above, MSNBC's Professor Melissa Harris-Perry talks about how female sexual desire has been treated throughout history in our male-dominated culture. Pointing to a New York Times Magazine article "Unexcited" about Lybrido, a new pill awaiting FDA approval that's supposed to "stoke sexual desire in women,"

Birmingham police arrested Martin Luther King Jr. on 12 April 1963, and he penned his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" while imprisoned, slipping it as a crumpled wad of paper to his friend Clarence Jones. Jones did not know what it was until later. On its 50th anniversary, rather than comment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," I'm commemorating its

Updates at this label: Baby AntonioWhat a horrific story, "Baby Shot Dead in Stroller"! On the video later in this post, you will see Sherry West, the mother of a 13-month old boy in Brunswick, Georgia, who was shot in the face and died instantly. West says that Baby Antonio was shot by two young black males (ages 14 and 17). Sadly, it's possible that it happened just as the mother said it did,

I did not plan to be in the French Quarter on Super Bowl weekend, but I'm glad that I was forced down there.

Richard Blanco, inaugural poet, delivered a beautiful poem for President Barack Obama's inauguration on January 21, 2013. The poem is entitled "One Day. " On Twitter I described the poem as "beautiful, lyrical, expansive, inclusive." I saw others tweet about its strong imagery. The poet discussed earlier with the BBC capturing the U.S.A. in verse. He told the interviewer that writing a poem

Are there any men out there who will boycott Chik-fil-A because Dan Cathy also downed men who divorce and remarry? He said, ". . . and we are all married to our first wives." (I guess he voted for Obama in 2008, not McCain.) More than likely he disapproves old-school Mormonism, drinking and smoking, and probably scientists who believe in evolution, too. Seriously, it is not news that Cathy is

Last night, I watched the first two installments of HBO's mini-series John Adams, starring the exceptionally talented Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney as John and Abigail Adams. Although I am sure that some moments are romanticized, the series is still much closer to the reality of America's struggle for independence from Great Britain than the fairy tales many of us were fed as children, and

This post has been syndicated at BlogHer.com where it has been updated to reflect the revelation that the artist in black face is of African descent.The National Afro-Swedish Association is demanding that Sweden's minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth be fired for participating in an April 15th World Art Day celebration during which she ate a piece of cake. The problem is not that she ate

If you would prefer to read the text of this poem outside the video, click here.I do not have an easy answer to that question in the title of this post--"What's wrong with writing sentimental poetry and fiction?"--but I have a few thoughts about why writing critics reject poets who write what they call "Hallmark Card verse" or fiction authors who slather on the sentimentality that causes readers

Reminding President Barack Obama that we all know he can sing now, given his crooning of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" earlier this year, blues man Buddy Guy coaxed the president into singing a few bars of "Sweet Home Chicago" with an all-star band at the White House Tuesday night. Mick Jagger handed the president the mic while B.B. King and other blues greats provided accompaniment. You can

In 2012, a documentary based on Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, Slavery By Another Name, will premier on PBS. The book documents the systematic re-enslavement of many African-Americans in prisons in the American South from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon, a white journalist, calls this form of slavery "neoslavery" and says that slavery technically did not end until 1942

When I took my family out to breakfast Saturday morning, my son, who should not have been surfing the Net during family time, chuckled loudly while looking at something on his Droid phone. He then showed me the picture of a black man holding up and looking at a bag of Negro, some kind of snack food. I laughed pretty hard, and my daughter laughed as well.The bag clearly had foreign words on it,

When my father, age 91, told me a few weeks ago that a woman, born Augustine Lemieux Stevens (a.k.a. Gussie), had died, I shuddered for moment in a spasm of grief. I grieved not because I knew Ms. Gussie but because I did not know her. Born on September 13, 1911 in Vacherie, Louisiana, of St. James Parish, she lived near him when he was a child growing up in that rural town. Vacherie sits on

As I said on Twitter yesterday, "I was in New Jersey when [the] towers came down. I've written about it before. I don't know if I want to again just b/c of [this] 10 year anniversary." I grappled with whether or not to write anything about September 11 a decade later because it took me until 2004, a whole three years after September 11, 2001, to write anything at all about what I felt on that

I've already written about Slavery: The Game here at this blog, and I updated and posted on the topic at BlogHer.com as well. Now there's a twist that leads us to the promotional video's creators.After contemplating speculation that the game was a hoax, possible protest, or some kind of publicity stunt, I have learned that the video on YouTube and the associated website are part of a promotion

The video embedded in this post is from Democracy NOW! and is about a documentary co-produced by actor Danny Glover. As described on its YouTube page:(the documentary and the clip feature "rare archival footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely. The Democracy NOW! episode and was) broadcast from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation's largest festival for