LEST WE FORGET.... As an historian of the African American Experience in the Americas and a performance artist of who evokes references of historical trauma in my work, I am acutely conscious of historical inequalities, inequities, and mass traumas committed against black folk. And most of you know that I utilize this knowledge in my work as a stepping stone for healing, restoration, and reconciliation of humanity. If history is important, then it is necessary to unearth it from beneath the buried layers of mere mystery and memory. The protocol is to research and disseminate the content, the context--the milieu in which the historical moment under discussion manifested as a phenomenon, an event, whose occurrence mirrored the attitudes and behaviors of society and altered the progress of human relations in such a way that even today we are still grappling with the cultural and societal consequences of the racism, social, economic, and political disparities as well as the geospatial differences in neighborhood and housing patterns. The Atlanta Riot of 1906 is an historical event in which all of these factors collided and erupted into civil unrest in which nearly 100 people were killed. This weeks leads up to the doom of the Atlanta Race Riot which occurred over the course of four days, September 22-26, 1906. My heart is heavy over the murderous atrocities that abbreviated tremendous possibilities in Atlantas black community and at the same time I am satiated by the ability of black folk to overcome the setbacks and achieve the dreams, of our ancestral foreparents, who, as our poetic sage Maya Angelou put, became the dream and the hope of the slave. We rise. We rise. We rise!
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:32:34 +0000
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