2/ I start with my annual provocation, taking on the question: "Why is there no White History Month?" Bring it on. "It would relieve the burden on African-Americans to recast the nation’s entire racial history in the shortest month of the year"https://bit.ly/3amuMNQ
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3/ My interview with Claudette Colvin, the Montgomery teen local civil rights leaders elevated before Rosa Parks but dumped after she got pregnant, is the piece I'm most proud of. "They treated her like a fallen woman...she fell out of history altogether."https://bit.ly/3oCIK37
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4/ Maya Angelou granted me a 45 minute interview: 16 hours later we were both drunk in her limo. "Do you want ice and stuff with your whiskey Ms Angelou?" her assistant asked. "I want a little bit of ice and a lot of stuff." What a day! What a woman!https://bit.ly/3jcLROc
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5/ While reporting this story, into the then unsolved murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi, I asked a man for directions. He went for his gun and threatened to shoot me. "If a lot has changed in Mississippi, an awful lot has also stayed the same."https://bit.ly/3pMwfTX
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6/ I named my daughter after Zora Neale Hurston. "The world was not ready in 1930 for a black, working class woman driving through the South collecting folklore tales in a Chevrolet coupe she called "Sassy Susie". But Hurston was ready for the world."https://bit.ly/3jjepFE
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7/ Jazz is central to New Orleans' identity. A year after hurricane Katrina its musicians were still struggling. "The idea was not to move evacuees to a safer place, but to remove them altogether: blueprints without black people."https://bit.ly/3cRbmDx
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8/ Brandon Moore, 16, was shot in the back by an off-duty cop as he ran away. The Detroit papers didn't even bother to mention his name. “We’re deemed not reportable..Black children are dispensable. Violence is expected to happen in these communities.”https://bit.ly/39YPfZS
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9/ When John Carlos raised his fist at the 1968 Olympics his life changed forever. "When all the dust settles and we're getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet."https://bit.ly/3aJo6cT
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10/ My son's 14 today: born the weekend Obama announced his presidential run. People kept telling me a black president would bode well for him. I kept asking why. "I understood the symbolic importance. I just didn't want to mistake it for substance."https://bit.ly/3cSYZqH
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11/ In 1996 I worked
@washingtonpost for 3 months on the@sternfellow ship: my first experience as a Black Briton in the US. "Here I look local & sound foreign & an object of intrigue. At home I look foreign & sound local & everybody tries not to notice." https://wapo.st/2MUtrWPNäytä tämä ketju -
12/ My first big piece on Obama, when black Democrats favoured Hillary 3-1. "When he started," said one friend. "It was definitely a long shot. He's got this funny name. He's black. It wasn't even clear at that stage if he'd even get the black vote."https://bit.ly/3tQ7dWs
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After Obama won Iowa some gushed about a post-racial America. I wasn't buying it. "Race is virtually absent from his message but central to his meaning. He has the role of an inadequate & ineffective balm on the long-running sore that is race in America."https://bit.ly/2Nk83tQ
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14/ Ali! "Imagine it for a moment!" said Sonia Sanchez. "The heavyweight champion, a magical man, taking his fight out of the ring and into the arena of politics and standing firm. The message that sent."https://bit.ly/2NkoxCi
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15/ The black diaspora used to look at Black America and see dissidence. Then came Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Puffy and Tiger. "More wealth and less consciousness undermined the potential for solidarity with other black people from poorer nations."https://bit.ly/3rTZdSB
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16/ "We cannot always espouse fashionable causes. So hang it. It is time that someone spoke up for Uncle Tom. Not the Uncle Tom of popular insult and racial slur, but the Tom of literary history - the man who lived on the page."https://bit.ly/2ZiOYeh
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17/ My interview with Angela Davis was illuminating. "When people call for diversity and link it to justice and equality, that's fine. But there's a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change."https://bit.ly/3dp05Lb
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18/ Roots of Black America's affection for Obama were both obvious & complex. "The ascent of America's first black president coincided with one of the steepest descents of the economic fortunes of black Americans both in real terms & relative to whites."https://bit.ly/3diwW49
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19/
#BlackLivesMatter
laid bare the unresolved issues of the post-civil rights era. "We can celebrate a black president, black professors and black tennis players all we want. But the issue of the sanctity of black life has still not been settled."https://bit.ly/2NB0u2e Näytä tämä ketju -
20/ The Louis Farrakhan interview was difficult to get but easy to do. "There's no office he wishes to run for, no part of the white-dominated power structure with which he's in negotiation. He can say what he likes. For better, & sometimes for worse."https://bit.ly/3kaIDve
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21/ Skip Gates' arrest outside his own home laid bare tensions around race & class. "The fact that racism might affect a Harvard professor is amazing only if one believes black people who've reached a certain status should be exempt from racism."https://n.pr/3dxTXQS
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22/ “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream’," one adviser told King the evening before the March on Washington. “It’s trite, it’s cliche. You’ve used it too many times already.” An extract from my book 'The Speech'https://bit.ly/3pGldyS
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22/ The day I interviewed Jesse Jackson he was grumpy. 'He was my mentor and my teacher, but I would never work with him again. He'll be in a television studio and he'll say we're going to march in Philadelphia or Boston, and we'd know nothing about it. 'https://bit.ly/3aGSPsd
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24/ I was honoured to write the Afterword to Richard Wright's Native Son. "One reason the book remains a classic is because while the racial power structure has evolved its basic underpinnings remain recognizable even 80 years later."https://bit.ly/3khT5kG
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25/ European racism operates differently to American racism. But its still racism. "Selective amnesia about their own imperial legacy leads ineluctably to a false sense of moral superiority around racism among many white Europeans toward the US."https://bit.ly/3sox3PP
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26/ Some people love being interviewed. Tracy Chapman isn't one of them. She wasn't arrogant; just withdrawn. "Everyone should stand up for what they believe in, or try to do some good. I don't think artists have a greater responsibility than anyone else."https://bit.ly/3qTTRXs
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27/ Assessing Obama's legacy was complicated by the fact that his departure gave way to Trump's arrival. "Indulging the symbolic promise of a moment is one thing; engaging with the substantial record of more than seven years in power is quite another."https://bit.ly/2NzUqHG
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28/ In Ferguson, shortly after Michael Brown's killing, you could see the first flickers of a fire still burning globally. "Not only do black people here now see themselves differently, the town’s white establishment is seeing them for the first time."https://bit.ly/2ZXpJyE
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29/ My final piece in this thread was my final piece as US correspondent. "If I had to pick a summer to leave, this would be the one. Another season of black parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining. A summer ripe for rage."https://bit.ly/3bIXsBq
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