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John Lewis (politician)



John Robert Lewis
Representative of Georgia's
5th District
Term of office:
1987-present
Political party: Democat

Preceded by: Wyche Folwer,Jr.
Succeeded by: Incumbent
Born: February 21, 1940
Troy, Alabama

John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and was an important leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and led the struggle to end segregation. Lewis, a member of the Democratic Party, has represented the 5th District of Georgia (map) in the United States House of Representatives since 1987. The district encompasses almost all of Atlanta.

Born in Troy, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, Lewis was educated at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement. He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights. Lewis became nationally known after his prominent role on the Selma to Montgomery marches, when police beat the nonviolently marching Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today.

Of John Lewis, the historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream, (speech) was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force.

"John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events"”some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled."

On October 5, 1963, Zinn began an article called "The Battle-Scarred Youngsters" in The Nation in this way:

Standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, John Lewis turned his wrath, not at the easy target, the Dixiecrats, but against the Administration... To many, the March had been presented as a gigantic lobby for the Administration's Civil Rights Bill, but Lewis pointed quickly, unerringly, to the weaknesses in the bill. Furthermore, by sponsoring a new civil-rights bill, the Administration had skillfully turned attention to Congress, and deflected the erratic spotlight of the civil-rights movement from possibly focusing on inadequacies of the Executive. The straight, crass fact at which John Lewis was aiming is this: the national government, without any new legislation, has the power to protect Negro voters and demonstrators from policemen's clubs, hoses and jails"”and it has not used that power.

The full article was later reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973.

After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.

Lewis first ran for elective office, in 1977, when a vacancy occurred in Georgia's 5th District. A special election was called after President Jimmy Carter appointed incumbent Congressman Andrew Young to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Atlanta City Councilman Wyche Fowler. In 1981, Lewis was himself elected to the Atlanta City Council.

In 1986, when Fowler ran for the United States Senate, Lewis defeated fellow civil rights leader Julian Bond in the Democratic primary to succeed Fowler in the 5th District. This win was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic, majority-black 5th District. Lewis was the second African-American to represent Georgia in Congress since Reconstruction. Young was the first. Lewis has been re-elected nine times without serious opposition, often with over 70 percent of the vote. He has been unopposed for reelection since 2002.

Since 1991, Lewis has been senior chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc..

Lewis is, according to the Associated Press, "the first major House figure to suggest impeaching George W. Bush," arguing that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said: "He is not King, he is president."[5]

For many years, he has been on the powerful House Means and Ways Committee and is the ranking minority leader of its Subcommittee on Oversight.

Lewis, an outspoken progressive and staunch opponent of the Iraq War, announced that he was endorsing Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate in 2006, despite Lieberman's loss to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary.


References

Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973 (Library of America: 2003) ISBN 1-931082-29-4

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, (Harvest Books: 1999) ISBN 0-15-600708-8. The U.S. Congressman tells of life in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement, the numerous arrests, sit-ins, and marches that led to breaking down the barriers of discrimination in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.

Quotes
"I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence."

"I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living."

[source: Wikipedia]

Angela Yvonne Davis



Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American radical activist and philosopher who was associated with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s. She first achieved nationwide notoriety when she was linked to the murder of judge Harold Haley during an attempted Black Panther prison break; she fled underground, and was the subject of an intense manhunt. After 18 months as a fugitive, she was captured, arrested, tried, and eventully acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. She is currently Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality and for prison abolition. Davis is a founder of Critical Resistance.


In the 1970s

Childhood

Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, in the midst of Jim Crow laws. Her father, a graduate of St. Augustine's College, a traditional black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, was briefly a high school history teacher. Leaving teaching due to the low salary, he owned and operated a service station in the black section of Birmingham. Her mother, also college educated, was an elementary school teacher with a history of political activism.

Using their modest income, the family purchased a large home in a mixed neighborhood where Angela spent most of her youth. The neighborhood, called "Dynamite Hill" locally, was marked by racial conflict. She was occasionally able to spend time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City. Her brother, Ben Davis, played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

During her childhood, Angela experienced the humiliations of racial segregation. She was bright and begged to enter school early, attending Carrie A. Tuggle School, a Black elementary school in dilapidated facilities and later Parker Annex, a similarly dilapidated annex of Parker High School devoted to middle school education. Angela read voraciously. By her junior year, at 14, she applied for and was accepted to a program of the American Friends Service Committee which placed Black students from the South in integrated schools in the north. She chose to attend high school at Elizabeth Irwin High School, also known as the Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village in New York City a small private school favored by the radical community. There Angela was exposed to study of socialism and communism and recruited to the Communist youth group, Advance, where she became acquainted with children of the leaders of the Communist Party including her lifelong friend, Bettina Aptheker.

Education and early career

Upon graduation from high school, Davis was awarded a full scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three Black students in her freshman class. Initially alienated by the isolation of the campus (at that time she was into Camus and Sartre), she soon made friends with the foreign students on campus.

She first encountered Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and later became his student. She worked at part-time jobs earning money to spend her summer in Europe and attend the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. That summer she spent time in Paris and Switzerland before going on to the Festival in Finland, where she and the other young people were strongly impressed by the energetic Cuban delegation. She returned home to an FBI interview about her attendance at the Festival which the government considered communist sponsored.

During her second year, she decided to major in French and continued her intensive study of Sartre. Davis was accepted for the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program and managed to talk Brandeis into extending support with her scholarship to cover the expenses. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she lived together with other students with a French family. It was at Biarritz that she received news of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by the KKK, which deeply affected her as she was personally acquainted with the four young victims. Again, as at Brandeis, she was socially isolated; all the other students were Whites who could offer sympathy but did not share her grief. That year President Kennedy was assassinated and there were two Têt, Vietnamese New Year, festivals in Paris, one sponsored by supporters of the South, one by supporters of the North. Davis attended the festival sponsored by the North which featured a clown dressed as an American GI.

Nearing completion of her degree in French language, she realized her major interest was philosophy. She became interested in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse. On return to Brandeis, she audited his course (required French courses precluded enrollment). Marcuse turned out to be approachable and helpful; Davis began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965 she graduated, magna cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.



In Germany, having only a stipend of $100 a month to work with, she had great difficulty finding lodging, but after much looking finally found a place with a sympathetic family, later moving with a group of students into a sort of loft in an old factory building. At the University, weak in German, she had great difficulty following the lectures of Adorno but soon found that her fellow students, native Germans, shared her difficulty. Visiting East Berlin during the May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the German Socialist Student League, SDS, a radical student group. Davis participated in actions with them; but things were happening back in the United States, for example, the Black Panther Party, and she was eager to get back. Marcuse in the meantime had moved to the University of California at San Diego. With the permission of Adorno, she followed him there after two years in Frankfurt.

On her way to California, she stopped off in London to attend a conference centered on the theme of "The Dialectics of Liberation." The small Black contingent included Stokely Carmichael and Michael X, a local West Indian activist. Davis was sporting her trademark hairstyle by then and was thus identifiable as a sympathizer with the Black Power movement. Although moved by Stokely Carmichael's fiery rhetoric, she was disappointed by the Black nationalist sentiments of the Black contingent and their rejection of Communism as a "white man's thing." She held the view that nationalism was a barrier to grappling with the underlying issue, capitalist domination of working people of all races.

Once in San Diego, she earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, returning to Germany for her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin, GDR. Davis worked as a philosophy lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, during the 1960s, during which time she also was a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party USA and associated with the Black Panther Party.

In a controversial decision, the Board of Regents of the University of California, led by Ronald Reagan, fired her from her job in 1969 because of her membership in the Communist Party. She was later rehired after community uproar over the decision. Davis ran for Vice President on the Communist ticket in 1980 and 1984 along with Gus Hall.

Notoriety

Cambridge Common demonstration, Boston, 1970
Cuban poster saying: "Freedom for Angela Davis.", 1971On August 18, 1970, Davis became the third woman and the 309th individual to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List when she was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide, due to her alleged participation in an escape attempt from Marin County Hall of Justice.

During the summer of of 1970, Davis had become involved in Black Panther efforts to garner support for the imprisoned George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette, known as the "Soledad Brothers". On August 7, George's brother, 17-year-old Jonathon Jackson, along with two others, disrupted the trial proceedings in an attempt to assist the escape of friend James McClain. McClain was on trial for an alleged attempt to stab an officer. In the courthouse the three stood up from their seats, directed everyone to freeze at gunpoint, and led the judge, prosecuting lawyer, and several jurors into a van parked outside. As the hostages entered the van Jackson and the others were reported to have shouted, "We want the Soledad Brothers freed by 12:30 today!,". During the escape attempt, Jackson and accomplice William Christmas were killed in a shootout with the police. Judge Harold Haley was killed by his captors with a shotgun taped to his throat inside the van. Prosecutor Gary Thomas was paralyzed by a police bullet during the incident.

A .38 caliber revolver was found in the possession of the dead George Jackson at the crime scene. [1] The gun was registered in Davis's name, and she was soon wanted by the FBI for conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. The guns used in the kidnapping were traced to Davis, implicating her in the escape attempt. A California warrant was issued for Davis' arrest in which she was charged as an accomplice to murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.[1]

Detention

Davis fled California and evaded the police for over two months before being captured in New York City. She was tried and acquitted of all charges eighteen months after her capture. Her bail was posted by Rodger McAfee, a farmer from Caruthers, California.

While being held in the Women's Detention Center in New York City, Davis got on well with other inmates and with the help of her outside supporters was able to mobilize the prisoners, in particular, helping to initiate a bail program for indigent prisoners. Initially, she was segregated from the general population, but with the help of her excellent legal team was able in short order to obtain a Federal court order to get out of the segregated area. In 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released the song "Angela" about her and Rolling Stones released "Sweet Black Angel" which chronicled her legal problems and advocated for her release. The same year, she was exonerated on all charges.

Following release

Following her release, Davis temporarily relocated to Cuba following in the footsteps of fellow radicals Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael. Her reception by Afro Cubans at a mass rally was so enthusiastic that she was reportedly barely able to speak.[2] Davis's visit had a significant impact on Afro-Cubans at a time when expressions of black identity were rare on the island. Her revolutionary credentials allowed admirers to identify with her without fear of being labelled counter-revolutionary by their peers. [3]

Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized Davis' sympathy for the Soviet Union in a speech he delivered to the AFL-CIO on July 9, 1975 in New York City, claiming hypocrisy in her attitude toward prisoners under Communist governments: as noted by Solzhenitsyn, a group of Czech dissidents "addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: `They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.' That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you."[4]

Later career

Speaking at the University of Alberta, March 28, 2006 she has continued a career of activism, and has written several books.

A principal focus of her current activism is the state of prisons within the United States. She considers herself an abolitionist, not a "prison reformer," and refers to the United States prison system as the "prison-industrial complex." Her solutions include abolishing prisons and addressing the class, race, and gender factors that have led to large numbers of blacks and Latinos being incarcerated [2].

Davis was one of the primary founders of Critical Resistance, a national, grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish what she perceives to be the prison-industrial complex.

She has lectured at San Francisco State University, Stanford University and other schools. She is currently the Presidential Chair and Professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the Feminist Studies department. She states that in her teaching, which is mostly at the graduate level, she concentrates more on posing questions which encourage development of critical thinking than on imparting knowledge. In 1997, she came out as a lesbian in Out Magazine. [3]

Davis unsuccessfully rallied against the 1995 Million Man March, arguing that the exclusion of women from this event necessarily promoted male chauvinism, and that the organizers of the event, including Louis Farrakhan, preferred women to take subordinate roles in society. Together with Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, she formed the African American Agenda 2000, a small alliance of Black feminists in response to the March.

Davis is no longer a member of the Communist Party, leaving to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which broke from the CPUSA due to the latter body's support of the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 and the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact. [5] She remains on the Advisory Board of the Committees. [4] Davis points to Cuba as an example of a country which successfully addresses social and economic problems. In her view democracy and socialism are more compatible than democracy and capitalism.

In recent years, Angela Davis has spoken in panels against the death penalty. She spoke at a panel in the University of California, Santa Cruz to free Kevin Cooper in 2004. She also spoke at another panel in 2005 in defense of Stanley Williams. Angela Davis remains as a prominent figure in the abolitionist struggle against the death penalty in California.

Quotes

"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

"Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems."

"It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo."[6]

List of books

If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) ISBN 0-451-04999-3

Frame Up: The Opening Defense Statement Made (1972)
Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) ISBN 0-7178-0667-7

Women, Race and Class (1981) ISBN 0-394-71351-6

Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1985) ISBN 0-913175-11-0

Women, Culture and Politics (1989) ISBN 0-679-72487-7
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999) ISBN 0-679-77126-3

The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1999) ISBN 0-631-20361-3

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) ISBN 1-58322-581-1

http://www.cbs.niu.edu/cbs%20brochure/Speak%20Out%20-%2...20Angela%20Davis.htm

Derrick Bell



Derrick Bell is a compelling voice on issues of race and class in this society. Throughout his 40-year career as a lawyer, activist, teacher, and writer, he has provoked his critics and challenged his readers with his uncompromising candor and original progressive views.

Bell became the first tenured black professor at the Harvard Law School in 1971. He relinquished it in 1992, when he refused to return from a two-year, unpaid leave of absence he took to protest the lack of women of color on the faculty.

Professor Bell is not a newcomer to personal protests of this nature. In 1980, he left Harvard for five years to accept the deanship at the Oregon Law School. Bell left the post in Oregon when the faculty directed that he not extend an offer to an Asian American woman faculty candidate who, after an extended search, had been listed third on the list. When the top two candidates (both white males) declined the position, the faculty decided to reopen the search rather than extend an offer to the Asian American woman.

Books by Derrick Bell

Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice

Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad
Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (Critical America Series)

Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence

Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home

Race, Racism, and American Law
Constitutional Conflicts: 1997-98 Edition

Afrolantica Legacies

Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester



Derrick Bell (born November 6, 1930) is a visiting professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law for the past 15 years and a major figure within the legal studies discipline of Critical Race Theory.


Early life

Born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Bell received an A.B. from Duquesne University in 1952 and an L.L.B. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1957. Concerned and dismayed that any gains made by civil rights laws of the 1960s were quickly being eroded in the 1970s, Bell, a lawyer who served as the executive director of an NAACP branch, began to fashion arguments that were designed to change existing laws. In doing so, he worked alongside other prominent civil rights attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter and Constance Baker Motley.


Academic contributions

Bell is arguably the most influential source of thought critical of traditional civil rights discourse. Bell's critique represented a challenge on the dominant liberal and conservative position on civil rights, race and the law. Derrick Bell employed three major arguments in his analyses of racial patterns in American law: Constitutional contradiction, the interest convergence principle, and the price of racial remedies.

Bell continued in his writings on critical theory even after accepting a teaching position at Harvard University. Much of his legal scholarship was influenced by his experience both as a black man and as a civil rights attorney. Writing in a narrative style, Bell contributed to the intellectual discussions on race. According to Bell, his purpose in writing was to examine the racial issues within the context of their economic and social and political dimensions from a legal standpoint.

For instance, in The Constitutional Contradiction, Bell argued that the framers of the Constitution chose the rewards of property over justice. With regard to the interest convergence, he maintains that whites will promote racial advances for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.

Finally, in The Price of Racial Remedies, Bell argues that whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status. Each of the arguments presented shed a different light on the traditional racial discourse.

Bell is also the author of a number of books and short stories, including "Ethical Ambition" and "The Space Traders".

Derrick Bell is a supporter of animal rights and PETA.

more...

Derrick Bell, a mild mannered but thoughtful young dreamer ended up making history as much more than just a devoted law professor and bestselling author.

Known foremost as the brave, handsome black Weld Professor of Law at Harvard University who would be dismissed in 1992 by the prestigious school for refusing to end his two-year leave protesting the absence of minority women on the law faculty...Bell's activism and commitment to "a life of meaning and worth" began sometime after graduation from college in the racist, segregated atmosphere of 1950's America. It was at that time that Bell worked diligently as a civil rights worker for the U.S. Justice Department and later found himself drafted to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund by none other than Thurgood Marshall.

While the world was used to fiery, gospel-inflected "race men" with fists poised to shake equality from the heavens"”what they hadn't seen much of were classy, casual, intellectual, highly skilled and seemingly dispassionate social thinkers"”men whose hearts and souls were not only firmly and irrevocably planted in the African Diaspora, but equally entrenched in the economic and social need for Pro Black Discourse in academia and world politics. No small feat when one thinks of all the non-threatening "white sensitive" black men that litter schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and even many of the historically black colleges today.

Alas, Derrick Bell was not just black in color. He was black in purpose, black in intent and true to himself and the needs of his people and his people's reality.

In 1973, he authored what has become a standard text of all American law schools, the groundbreaking "Race, Racism and American Law". In 1985 he was bestowed the Teacher of the Year Award by the Society of American Law Schools. And as mentioned earlier, in 1992, he was kicked out of Harvard for being one of the few men since Frederick Douglass to stand up solely, and without hesitation or personal gain, for the rights of minority women when he demanded that a minority woman be given voice and presence in the law faculty.

On top of all that, Derrick Bell became a hero to minions of young and seemingly invisible new age Americans"”many of whom, like myself, were black and female and had no access to higher education no matter how intelligent or hopeful we were. These people found inspiration in the literary writings of Derrick Bell, losing themselves in powerful novels and story collections of which the titles themselves told of our struggle..."Faces at the Bottom of the Well" (1992)...."And We Are Not Saved" (1987)...."Gospel Choirs" (1996)...."Ethical Ambition: A Life of Meaning and Worth" (2002).

Clearly, emphatically and without reproach or fear, Derrick Bell has spoken up truthfully and heroically as not just an American or a human being"”which just about anybody can lay claim to"”but "identifiably" as a proud black man, an uncompromising representative of black people and their reality, a devoted husband, a competent, caring father and a teacher of the law of the land...both understanding and perpetuating the tenets of justice, morality and the preservation of the human spirit.

Derrick Bell lives in New York with his beautiful wife Janet and is a visiting Professor at New York University's School of Law. His latest release is "Silent Covenants", an acclaimed exploration of the landmark Brown decision (Oxford University Press).

"”Kola Boof (June 2004)

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies.

Frantz Fanon [/b](July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) is a Martinique-born French author and essayist. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.



Life ~
Martinique and WWII

Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony and now a French département. He was born into a mixed family background of African slaves, Tamil indentured servants, and a white man. The family were relatively well-off for Martinicans, but far from middle class. They could, however, afford the fees for the all-black Lycee Schoelcher.

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique. Forced to remain on the island, French soldiers became "authentic racists". Many accusations of harassment and sexual misconduct arose. The abuse of the Martinican people by the French Army was a major influence on Fanon, as it reinforced his feelings of alienation and his disgust at the realities of colonial racism. At the age of eighteen, Fanon fled the island and traveled to Dominica to join the Free French Forces. He later enlisted in the French army and saw service in France, notably in the battles of Alsace. In 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de Guerre medal. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany -- along with photo journalists -- Fanon's regiment was "bleached" of all non-white soldiers and Fanon and his fellow black soldiers were sent to Toulon instead.

In 1945, Fanon returned to Martinique. His return lasted only a short time. While there, he worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire, who would be the greatest influence in his life. Although Fanon never professed to be a communist, Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a parliamentary delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed long enough to complete his Baccalaureate and then went to France where he studied medicine and psychiatry. He was educated in Lyon where he studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures. After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry under the radical Catalan, Francois de Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the important yet often overlooked role of culture in psychopathology. After his residency, Fanon practiced psychiatry in France for another year and then (from 1953) in Algeria. He was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he stayed until his resignation in 1956.


France

While in France, Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the effect of colonial subjugation on the human psyche. This book was a personal account of Fanon's experience of being a black man, an intellectual with a French education rejected in France by the French because of his skin colour.


Algeria

Fanon left France for Algeria, where he had been stationed for some time during the war. He secured an appointment as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. It was there that he radicalized methods of treatment. In particular, he began socio-therapy which connected with his patients' cultural backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954 he joined the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) as a result of contacts with Dr Chaulet.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon later discussed in depth the effects on Algerians of torture by the French forces. The fact that some French paratrooper units engaged in torture has had political repercussions in France, where those alleged to have engaged in torture enjoy an amnesty for the "events." That is why Général Paul Aussaresses who admitted publicly to torturing terrorist suspects was not tried for what he did but for not showing sufficient remorse.

Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabyle region, to study the cultural/psychological life of Algerians. His lost study of "The marabout of Si Slimane" is an example. These trips were also a means for clandestine activities, notably in his visits to the ski resort of Chrea which hid an FLN base. By summer 1956 he wrote his famous "Letter of resignation to the Resident Minister" and made a clean break with his French assimilationist upbringing and education. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957 and the "nest of fellaghas [rebels]" at Blida hospital was dismantled. Fanon left for France and subsequently traveled secretly to Tunis. He was part of the editorial collective of El Moudjahid for which he wrote to the end of his life. He also served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government and attended conferences in Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo and Tripoli. Many of his shorter writings from this period were collected posthumously in the book Toward the African Revolution. In this book Fanon even outs himself as a war strategist; in one chapter he discusses how to open a southern front to the war and how to run the supply lines.


Death

On his return to Tunis, after his exhausting trip across the Sahara to open a Third Front, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He went to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced some remission of his illness. On his return to Tunis he dictated his testament The Wretched of the Earth. When he was not confined to his bed, he delivered lectures to ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale) officers at Ghardimao on the Algero-Tunisian border. He made a final visit to Sartre in Rome and went for further leukemia treatment in the USA. Ironically, he was assisted by the CIA in traveling to the United States to receive treatment. He died in Bethesda [Maryland, US], on December 6, 1961 under the name of Ibrahim Fanon. He was buried in Algeria, after lying in state in Tunisia. Later his body was moved to a martyrs (chouhada) graveyard at Ain Kerma in western Algeria. Fanon was survived by his wife, Josie, their son, Olivier and daughter, Mireille.



Work

Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks while still in France, most of his work was written while in North Africa. It was during this time that he produced his greatest works, Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution (later republished as A Dying Colonialism) and perhaps the most important work on decolonization yet written, The Wretched of the Earth. The Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 by François Maspero and has a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. In it Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals like, Esprit and El Moudjahid.

*The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are recognized to contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work, including his doctoral thesis, has received little attention. As a result, Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence. In the original French, it is clear this is not the case. Furthermore, his work is interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature.

His participation in the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) from 1955 determined his audience as the Algerian colonized. It was to them that his final work, Les damnés de la terre (translated into English by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the Earth) was directed. It constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist/globalized world.


Influence

Fanon has had an inspiring impact on anti-colonial and liberation movements. In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba. Of these only Guevara was primarily concerned with Fanon's theories on violence; for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and "black consciousness" respectively. Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, the Irish, African Americans and others.

* would anyone like to comment on this who has read Fanon?

[source wikipedia.org]

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Works by Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967. Reprint of Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris, 1952.

Studies in a Dying Colonialism, or A Dying Colonialism. New York, 1965. Reprint of L'an cinq de la revolution algerienne. Paris, 1959.

The Wretched of the Earth. New York, 1965. Reprint of Les damnes de la terre. Paris, 1961.

Toward the African Revolution. New York, 1967. Reprint of Pour la revolution africaine. Paris, 1964.

Selected Criticism

Abel, Lionel. "Seven Heroes of the New Left." The New York Times Magazine 5 may 1968.

Bhabha, Homi. "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative." The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 40-66.

de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. New York: Putnam, 1964.

Bergner, Gwen. "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." PMLA 110.1 (January 1995): 75-88.

Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.

Fuss, Diana. "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification." Diacritics (Summer-Fall 1994): 20-42.

Gates, Henry Louis. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17 (1992): 457-470.

Geismar, Peter. Fanon. New York: The Dial Press, 1971.

Gendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon Books-Random House, 1973.

Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.

"Homage to Frantz Fanon." Presence Africaine 12 (1962): 130-152. Ten writers, politicians and scholars contributed to this special section, including Aime Césaire and Nkrumah.

Memmi, Albert. "The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon." Massachusetts Review (Winter 1973): 9-39.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1993.

Seigel, J. E. "On Frantz Fanon." American Scholar (Winter 1968): 84-96.

"Remembering Fanon." New Formations 1 (Spring 1987): 118-135. Homi Bhabha, Stephan Feuchtwang and Barbara Harlow contributed to a special section remembering Fanon on the 25th anniversary of his death.


Links to Other Sites: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html at bottom of page

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Medgar Evers

Known today more for his struggles for civil rights in Mississippi and his untimely death at the hands of an assassin than for his writings, Medgar Evers nevertheless left behind an impressive record of achievement.


A statue of Medgar Evers was erected to honor him in his adopted hometown of Jackson on June 28, 1992.

Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, and attended school there until he was inducted into the army in 1943. After serving in Normandy, he attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), majoring in business administration. While at Alcorn, he was a member of the debate team, the college choir, and the football and track teams, and he also held several student offices and was editor of the campus newspaper for two years and the annual for one year. In recognition of his accomplishments at Alcorn, he was listed in Who's Who in American Colleges.

At Alcorn he met Myrlie Beasley, of Vicksburg, and the next year, they were married on December 24, 1951. He received his B.A. degree the next semester and they moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, during which time Evers began to establish local chapters of the NAACP throughout the Delta and organizing boycotts of gasoline stations that refused to allow blacks to use their restrooms. He worked in Mound Bayou as an insurance agent until 1954, the year a Supreme Court decision ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Despite the court's ruling, Evers applied for and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School, but his attempt to integrate the state's oldest public university attracted the attention of the NAACP's national office, and that same year he was appointed Mississippi's first field secretary for the NAACP.

Evers and his wife moved to Jackson, where they worked together to set up the NAACP office, and he began investigating violent crimes committed against blacks and sought ways to prevent them. His boycott of Jackson merchants in the early 1960s attracted national attention, and his efforts to have James Meredith admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962 brought much-needed federal help for which he had been soliciting. Meredith was admitted to Ole Miss, a major step in securing civil rights in the state, but an ensuing riot on campus left two people dead, and Evers' involvement in this and other activities increased the hatred many people felt toward Evers.

On June 12, 1963, as he was returning home, Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin's bullet. Black and white leaders from around the nation came to Jackson for his funeral and then gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for his interment. Following his death, his brother, Charles, took over Medgar's position as state field secretary for the NAACP. The accused killer, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith, stood trial twice in the 1960s, but in both cases the all-white juries could not reach a verdict. Finally, in a third trial in 1994 (and thirty-one years after Evers' murder), Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The legacy of Medgar Evers is everywhere present in the Mississippi of today. This peaceful man, who had constantly urged that "violence is not the way" but who paid for his beliefs with his life, was a prominent voice in the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. Many tributes have been paid to Medgar Evers over the years, including a book by his widow, For Us, the Living, but perhaps the greatest tribute can be found in changes noted in Mississippi Black History Makers: "Ten years after Medgar's death the national office of the NAACP reported that Mississippi had 145 black elected officials and that blacks were enrolled in each of the state's public and private institutions of higher learning.... In 1970, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, more than one-fourth or 26.4 percent of black pupils in Mississippi public schools attended integrated schools with at least a 50 percent white enrollment. When Medgar died in 1963, only 28,000 blacks were registered voters. By 1971, there were 250,000 and by 1982 over 500,000."

"”John B. Padgett

Publications

Nonfiction:

"Why I Live in Mississippi." Ebony (November 1958). Rpt. in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. Vol. II: Nonfiction. Ed. Dorothy Abbott. Center for the Study of Southern Culture Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. 209-10.


Media Productions

Motion Pictures and Television Programs:

For Us the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers. Dir. Michael Schultz. Screenplay by Ossie Davis. Starring Howard Rollins, Jr., Irene Cara, Laurence Fishburne, and Paul Winfield. 1983. Television film based on the book by Myrlie B. Evers. (This film may be purchased online).

A Tribute to Medgar Evers. Broadcast by WBLT-TV, Jackson, Mississippi, on 28 June 1992. Includes interviews with Evers' friends and colleagues and an overview of his work for the NAACP in Mississippi.
Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers. New York: Ambrose Video, 1994. Originally broadcast on HBO as a segment of "The America Undercover" series. Executive producers: Paul Hamann, Sheila Nevins; photographer: Bob Perrin; film editor: Malcolm Daniel; original music: Mark T. White. Narrated by Julian Bond. The assassination of Medgar Evers is placed within the context of race relations in Mississippi at mid-century by means of archival photography, interviews with Myrlie Evers and convicted murderer Byron de la Beckwith, and reenactments of murder trial scenes.

Ghosts of Mississippi. Dir. Rob Reiner. Columbia Pictures/Castle-Rock Entertainment, 1996. Starring Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, James Woods, and Craig T. Nelson. Based on the book by Maryanne Vollyers.
Bibliography:

Biographical Sources:

Brown, Jennie. Medgar Evers. Los Angeles: Melrose Square Pub. Co., 1994.

Evers, Myrlie B., and William Peters. For Us, the Living. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Jackson, James E. At the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; A Tribute in Tears and a Thrust for Freedom. New York: Publisher's New Press, 1963.

Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994; Da Capo Press, 2002.

Salter, John R. Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. Foreword by R. Edwin King, Jr. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979.

Scott, R. W. Glory in Conflict: A Saga of Byron De La Beckwith. Camden, Arkansas: Camark Press, 1991.

Remembering Medgar Evers"”For a New Generation: A Commemoration. Developed by the Civil Rights Research and Documentation Project, Afro-American Studies Program, The University of Mississippi. Oxford, MS: distributed by Heritage Publications in cooperation with the Mississippi Network for Black History and Heritage, 1988.

Vollers, Maryanne. Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.


General:

see >> for live links http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/evers_medgar/

Black History Month "” Biography: Medgar Evers. Published by the Gale Group. Source: The African American Almanac, 7th ed., Gale, 1997.

"Medgar Wiley Evers, 1925-1963." Biographical sketch at the Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York web site.

"Medgar Wiley Evers, Sergeant, United States Army." From the Arlington National Cemetery web site www.arlingtoncemetery.com

"NPR: The Legacy of Medgar Evers." From National Public Radio.

Théophile Obenga



Théophile Obenga was born in Congo, Equatorial Africa. He was educated in Belgium, France, and the United States.

He is considered as one of the foremost students and followers of the late Cheikh Anta Diop. In the preface to Obenga's most renowned book Africa in Antiquity, Diop introduced him as follows: "Obenga is a polyvalent scholar with a threefold training as a philosopher, historian and linguist and knowing Greek, Latin, French. English, Italian, and practicing Arabic and Syriac. More importantly, he is the first Black African of his generation able to read the pharaonic language in the texts: he holds a degree in Egyptology and is a member of the Societe Francaise d'Egyptologie".

During the, UNESCO Colloquium on "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Decipherment of Meroitic Writing" held in Cairo (January 28-February 3. 1974). Diop and Obenga's brilliant and eloquent demonstration on the African essence of Black pharaonic Egypt's culture and civilization was a major landmark in African studies and sanctioned the death of cultural imperialism's long lasting attempt to whiten ancient Egypt. Under Marien NGouabi's government in the Congo, Obenga was Director of the Ecole Normale Superieure where he created an outstanding method for teaching African historiography and later became Minister for Foreign Affairs. He is presently Director General of the International Center for Bantu Studies, the only high-tech African-oriented database and cultural center of its kind focusing on the Egypto-Bantu world and head-quartered in Libreville, Gabon.

Obenga is the author of a massive scientific production partly published by Presence Africaine and including, in particular, Precolonial Central Africa, Zaire: Traditional Civilizations and Modern Culture. Stele for the Future (poetry), For A New History, Traditional Literature of the Mbochi, and The Bantu: Languages, Peoples and Civilizations.

He just completed a major study on The African Philosophy in Pharaonic Times, 2780-330 Before the Christian Era, excerpts from which are published for the first time in English in this issue.

Credit the poor and end poverty
Shan Ali
December 11, 2006

Nobel Peace laureate imagines a world without poverty

Last night a Bangladeshi economist and the institution he founded 30 years ago received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Professor Muhammad Yunus, known to many as the "banker to the poor", started his journey toward creating the Grameen Bank in 1976 with a loan to 42 desperately poor people. The total loan was $US27 - less than $US1 per person.

One of those borrowers was a woman who made bamboo stools. Yunus was shocked to learn that her moneylender required her to sell the finished stools back to him at a price that barely covered the cost of the bamboo. This kept her in a life of extreme poverty. With a loan from Yunus, the woman sold her product in the market and her profit soared.

Yunus was trained as an economist, not a banker, and over the past 30 years he has broken countless rules of banking and other disciplines. He provided loans to the poor, not the rich; to women, not men; in small amounts, not large; and without collateral or any paperwork.

The world would be a harsher place if these rules were never broken and if no one had ever questioned the notion that the poor were not credit-worthy.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee is celebrating the work and breakthroughs of Yunus, the Grameen Bank, and all the other revolutionaries who have pioneered this remarkable intervention.

This revolution has spread all over the world, including South-East Asia and the Pacific. The Australian arm of the bank, the Grameen Foundation Australia, oversees, funds and assists many projects in the region.

One such project, in the island province of Northern Samar, in the eastern Philippines, serves 10,000 poor and aims to reach 70,000 clients. They are borrowing money to buy tools and raw materials, lease land, pay for their children's education and repair their homes.

Such projects generate much-needed pro-poor economic growth and show how little it costs to lift large numbers of the poor out of poverty. In the developing economies of Asia, Africa and South America a loan of, say, $300 represents an amount roughly half the average annual household income - an equivalent of $20,000 in Australia.

While these projects are suited for developing countries where a few hundred dollars goes a long way and economies of scale are easy to reach, attempts to replicate Grameen's approach have been made in developed countries such as the US, France and Norway. In Australia a number of projects have a collective outreach of some 200 micro loans.

Grameen Australia is negotiating a large microcredit project in East Timor, where a small Grameen replication is already functioning. Plans are also under way to initiate a pilot project in Afghanistan. Initial research indicates that the security situation and other conditions in Afghanistan are right to put working capital in the hands of masses of self-employed women and men.

Last month Yunus joined more than 2000 delegates from 112 countries at the Global Microcredit Summit 2006 in Halifax, Canada. Delegates launched the second phase of the campaign with two new goals for 2015:

~ Reaching 175 million of the world's poorest families with microcredit, affecting 875 million family members.

~ Ensuring 100 million families rise above the $US1-a-day threshold, lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty.

This is a challenge to the microfinance movement. We have the potential to expand dramatically, but can we also make a profound contribution to the Millennium Development Goal of cutting $US1-a-day poverty in half by 2015?

As Yunus says: "Poverty does not belong in civilised human society. Its proper place is in a museum."

Let us work to use the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize as impetus to put poverty where it belongs.

Shan Ali is the co-founder of Grameen Foundation Australia.

EDUCATION >



LISA D. DELPIT is the holder of the Benjamin R. Mays Chair of Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she is a nationally and internationally-known speaker and writer whose work has focused on the education of children of color and the perspectives, aspirations, and pedagogical knowledge of teachers of color. She has used her training in ethnographic research to spark dialogues between educators on issues which impact students typically least well-served by 'our' educational system.

Dr. Delpit is particularly interested in teaching and learning in multicultural societies, having spent time studying these issues in Alaska, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and in various urban and rural sites in the United States.

Her background is in elementary education with an emphasis on language and literacy development. Her recent work has spanned a range of projects and issues, including creating high standards, innovative schools for poor, urban children, and developing urban leadership pgrograms for teachers. She has also taugh preservice and inservice teachers in many communities across the United States. Her primary effort at the time of interview, is establishing the Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State.

Delpit's work on school-community relations and cross-cultural communication were cited as contributions to her receiving a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1990. Dr. Delpit describes her strongest focus as "finding ways and means to best educate urban students, particularly African American, and other students of color."



Books:

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
by Lisa D. Delpit

How can we better educate teachers to accommodate ethnic and racial diversity? How can we stop training teachers to expect less of certain children? Drawing on her extensive teaching experience in classrooms from Alaska to New Guinea, an award-winning educator argues that all children must be given access to the codes of power that drive society.

The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom
by Lisa D. Delpit (Editor), Joanne Kilgour Dowdy (Editor)

A powerful and sophisticated reminder that words can indeed do as much damage as sticks and stones, "The Skin That We Speak" takes the discussion of language in the classroom beyond the highly charged war of idioms and presents today's teachers with a thoughtful exploration of the varieties of English they speak and the layers of politics, power,...


Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students
by Kathleen Cushman, Lisa D. Delpit (Introduction by)

This invaluable guide to teaching teenagers features the uncensored advice of 40 students from three cities on how teachers can transcend the barriers of adolescent identity and culture to reach the diverse pupils in today's urban schools.


Black Teachers on Teaching
by Michele Foster, Lisa D. Delpit (Foreword by)

An honest and compelling account of the politics and philosophies involved in the education of black children during the last 50 years. "A riveting portrait of the American century's inequality in education . . . with an eye not only to what was gained but what was lost".--"Education Week".


The Real Ebonics Debate
by Theresa Perry (Editor), Lisa D. Delpit (Editor)

In The Real Ebonics Debate some of our most important educators, linguists, and writers, as well as teachers and students reporting from the field, examine the lessons of the Ebonics controversy and unravel complexities of the issue that have never been acknowledged. An insightful look at the political nature of language and its inseparability from education.

The Politics of Curricular Change: Race, Hegemony, and Power in Education with a Foreword by Lisa Delpit
by M. Christopher Brown, Roderic R. Land (Editor), Lisa D. Delpit (Foreword by)

As different and significant peoples have joined its population, the United States has undergone various conceptions of education - its definition, purpose, content, and pedagogy, in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities-and education for the twenty-first century will require curricular change.


Dr. Lisa Delpit
http://education.fiu.edu/urbaned/scholars/index.htm


Dr. Lisa Delpit, Executive Director for the Center for Urban Education & Innovation, received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in 1993 from Harvard Graduate School of Education, which hailed her as a "visionary scholar and woman of courage." Her work on school-community relations and cross-cultural communication was cited when she received her MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. Most recently, Delpit has been selected as the Antioch College Horace Mann Humanity Award recipient for 2003, which recognizes a contribution by alumni of Antioch College who have "won some victory for humanity." She describes her strongest focus as "finding ways and means to best educate urban students, particularly African-American, and other students of color." Among her publications are Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (1995); The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children (co-edited with Theresa Perry, 1998); and The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom (co-edited with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, 2002).

Nice thread! I've read Delpit's book The Skin That We Speak. Very interesting view of today's bias educational environment.

quote:

Originally posted by Rowe:
Nice thread! I've read Delpit's book The Skin That We Speak. Very interesting view of today's bias educational environment.

Hi Rowe... any chance you could put up a short review and/or your perspectives?