Waiting for Ferguson (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly; Associated Press; DDFRTV; Democracy Now!; Goodreads

With St. Nick's entry comes racial controversy: Police detained anti-Black Pete demonstrators wearing T-shirts reading "No to Black Pete" as St. Nicholas arrived in Gouda, Netherlands, Nov. 15, 2014. Black Pete (Dutch Zwarte Piet), the traditional black-faced sidekick of Santa Claus (Sinterklaas), walked side-by-side with yellow-colored "Cheese Petes" and "Cookie Petes," a nod to the city's most famous products, but also a concession to critics of the traditional Black Petes. The children's fairy tale that has delighted kids for generations is being framed as a very politicized debate in the Netherlands, where discussion about the place in society of immigrants has simmered for years. (AP/mail.com)

  "Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People" (Sundance, 2014)

Missouri: We were thinking we'd execute them then leave them lying around for everybody to see. At least that was the plan. Y'know, keep everybody in their place. Makes our job of keeping them down easier (dayandadream.com).

"F the police" reads the mailbox, but police intend to F the community (slate.com, Aug. '14)

Ferguson: police state racism, murder of Mike Brown, provoking riots (socialesteemmedia)

(DN!) A new film explores how African American communities have used the medium of photography to shape how they are represented. "Through A Lens Darkly" is directed and produced by Thomas Allen Harris, who shares his own family's history in the film. Allen Harris is also the creator of the related project, the Digital Diaspora Family Road Show. Both were inspired in part by the book, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis, who also produced the film. Allen Harris joins Democracy Now! from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where his movie premiered.

The Fire Next Time

(AudioGo) Like Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, the great James Baldwin, author of and The Fire Next Time, tells it like it is in the 1960s, and we still have not learned.

The Fire Next Time

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the U.S. and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature. 

(RYF) This is an excerpt from Baldwin's N-gger, spoken in 1969 in London about the Black experience in the USA and how it relates to the Caribbean and Great Britain.

Ferguson October: Thousands march in St. Louis for police reform and the arrest of killer-cop Darren Wilson

Return of the Ferguson War Zone?
Mo. Enacts State of Emergency ahead of Mike Brown Grand Jury

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency in advance of the grand jury’s pending decision in the Police Officer Darren Wilson murder case in the Michael Brown shooting. On Monday, Gov. Nixon issued an executive order to activate the state’s National Guard in response to what he called "the possibility of expanded unrest." Nixon cited the protests in Ferguson and the St. Louis area since Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9. The grand jury has been meeting for nearly three months, and protests are expected to escalate if they choose not to indict. But while state officials say they fear violence, protesters say they fear a return to the militarized crackdown that turned their community into a war zone. As the grand jury nears a decision and all sides prepare for the unknown under a state of emergency, we are joined by two guests: Jeff Smith, a New School professor and former Missouri state senator whose new book is Ferguson: In Black and White, and Montague Simmons, chair of the St. Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle and a key organizer in the movement that has emerged since unarmed teenager Michael Brown’s murder.