What are you learning about black history and culture this month?
Please share with me what black history books and films you're reading or watching - ann@annbeltran.com. Or if you have your own story to share to inform others, please write. If I receive enough comments, I can send them out to the newsletter list.
I'm reading the new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. by Jonathan Eig, that draws on many resources released over the past years. Because of all the new information to draw upon, the book "King, a Life" offers gripping personal details. In conjunction with watching the Obama-produced film "Rustin" on Netflix, I've learned about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, well beyond anything I knew from photo clips surrounding the "I Have a Dream" speech. Also very revealing are the many sections on King's inner struggle with the burden thrust upon him, death threats and depression, and the status of black women at the time.
The Martin Luther King, Jr., monument on the National Mall, across the Tidal Basin from the Jefferson Memorial.
Surrounding King was the collective leadership of the anti-segregation movement
The collective leadership among men and women that led to the iconic Rosa Parks act of bus defiance is like a particle and wave phenomenon. The wave of historic mistreatment of blacks in southern cities found its particle moment when she refused to change her seat on the bus. It was the Montgomery AL bus boycott that thrust the 26-year old King into the forefront of the civil rights movement, not his own choosing.
That collective leadership that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1963, grew with student lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, mass arrests in southern cities, and ultimately into the North's complicity in structural forms of racism.
The March on Washington, organized in large part by Bayard Rustin, was the largest and most peaceful civil rights demonstration of the time with approximately 250,000 people attending.
Going farther back, get acquainted with the works of Isabel Wilkerson, whose book "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," opens up through personal stories the period following the worst of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War. A time when many black Southerners left the South to populate the eastern seaboard cities, Chicago, and California. More recently, she's written "Caste" which Ava DuVernay has made into the movie "Origin," just out for viewing. Her prior films include the Academy Award nominated documentary "13th," which is also a great film to see regarding the 13th Constitutional Amendment that outlawed slavery, except for punishment for a crime, thus leading to black mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex.
OR revisit "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
I'd heard about this book many times but never read it until I began my own account of Civil War Times, "Faith on the Mall." The message of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book is one MLK Jr came to adopt in his own championing of non-violence: the power of Christian love to overcome the degradation of blacks by whites. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had a huge readership that substantially strengthened the anti-slavery movement.
OR check out my own fictional "Faith on the Mall"
It begins in 1848, the year of the Pearl Incident in Washington, D.C., the largest nonviolent escape attempt by slaves in the U.S. Personal accounts follow of the slave markets, the great anti-slavery speeches in Congress, and the contraband camps in the North that held run-away slaves as contraband property of the South. And ultimately, we come to the signing by Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves in the Confederacy. For more, check out my website and past Newsletters here.
So much history to learn - hope you read or see at least one book or film that informs you on the 400 year story of the evolution of slavery in this country.
And why Black Lives Matter