Issac Hayes, R.I.P.

What a horrible weekend. First Bernie, and now Isaac Hayes has passed on. I remember being introduced to Hayes when I was a kid and first getting into music. I would plunder through my parents and grandmom’s records, and they had a copy of Black Moses. How fortunate can a little kid be to cut his musical teeth on one of the best soul albums ever made? I dare anyone to name a bad or even mediocre track on that album. Can’t be done. Rest in peace, Ike.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Isaac Hayes, the pioneering singer, songwriter and musician whose relentless “Theme From Shaft” won Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday afternoon, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said. He was 65.

A family member found him unresponsive near a treadmill and he was pronounced dead an hour later at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis, according to the sheriff’s office. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Bernie Mac, R.I.P.

Wow. He was so young. This is incredibly sad.

CHICAGO (AP) — Bernie Mac, the actor and comedian who teamed up in the casino heist caper “Ocean’s Eleven” and gained a prestigious Peabody Award for his sitcom “The Bernie Mac Show,” died Saturday at age 50.

“Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital,” his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.

He was a legend of comedy. A King.

Link Love: Trying Not To Get Too Angry Addition

It’s sad that this has to be done, but Gina from What About Our Daughters has started a Michelle Obama Watch blog.

R. Kelly is acquitted.

As the verdicts were being read on Friday, the singer started crying and whispering “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus,” over and over again, his lawyers said.

Jesus had nothing to do with it, asshole.

Now that Sen. Clinton is out of the race, black folk get to be women too!. Added bonus, “those over-sensitive people of color can’t call us racists!” (I learned something new today. Apparently, if no Republican has every called you a racist, then you aren’t a racist.) [Hat Tip: Ilyka]

Can you say intersectionality fail?

But wait, I thought you didn’t see color?

Yesterday marked the 45th anniversary of Medgar Evers assasination.

R.I.P. Bo Diddley

From the Associated Press:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Bo Diddley, a founding father of rock ’n’ roll whose distinctive “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm and innovative guitar effects inspired legions of other musicians, died Monday after months of ill health. He was 79.

Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., spokeswoman Susan Clary said. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.

Bo Diddley was rock and roll. No doubt. Unprecedented. Unmatched. All of you indie rockers that fawn over Jon Spencer, take a listen to The Black Gladiator and you’ll know where Spencer learned everything he knows.

Witness genius:

In Memory of Mildred Loving, Landmark of Civil Rights

Mildred Loving, who challenged Virginia’s anti-interracial marriage laws, resulting in the Supreme Court striking down laws against interracial marriages, passed away on Friday, 2 May.

From the AP:

RICHMOND, Va. – Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.

“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”

In Memory of Aimé Césaire

On Thursday, 17 April, the Martinique poet, activist, politician, and post-colonial theorist Aimé Fernand David Césaire died.

Césaire was a central figure in what can be considered the French version of the Harlem Renaissance. While in school at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , he helped found L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), a literary journal dedicated to the cultivation of black pride and which also birthed the Négritude movement, a literary and political movement that sought the “affirmation that one is black and proud of it”. His most famous works are his book-length poem, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (Notes From a Return to the Native Land), and the essay, “Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain.” Thanks to Professor Black Woman, I also found excerpts from his play, Une Tempête (adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest), which you should most definitely go and read.

Truth be told, I had meant to post this on Thursday, but it slipped my mind until I read this,

I believe that there should be canonical works. I believe that those works should be just that, CANONS. Open salvos in ” battles”designed to literally grapple and destroy and rebuild them . Text that lives an breathes and is on it’s feet, on it’s back, on it’s toes. How we take theory and make art. And how that is CONNECTED eternally through performance and history.

Most importantly how that performance is SPECIFICALLY and practically located in POC bodies and there interactions with personalizing and culturing various artforms , both intentionally and SIMPLY BY THEIR PRESENCE.

which, by coincidence, I feel perfectly sums up the life that Césaire led.

And so, I take the sad passing of a great artist and activist and choose to make the most positive I can out of it. I choose to renew my commitment to art, activism, and the life of the mind (not that it ever went anywhere, it’s more like renewing one’s wedding vows). I encourage those so inclined to do the same.

From Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal

ma negritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdite ruee contre
la clameur du jour
ma negritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’il
mort de la terre
ma negritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathedrale
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.

my Negritude is not a stone, its deafness dashed against
the clamor of the day
my Negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my Negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky
it pierces opaque prostration with its upright patience

[cross-posted at The Unapologetic Mexican]

In Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’d like to take the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death (I feel odd writing “anniversary.” The slight connotation of celebration is hard for me to shake, yet I can think of no better word right now.) to repost the Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said video. In the wake of the shameful support of the Dunbar Village rapists by the West Palm Beach NAACP, In the wake of this shameful Democratic Presidential nomination, I feel we are in a crisis. In looking back, in memory, there is strength. Which is not to say that we should wallow in the good old days of yesteryear, as if they ever existed, but to say that truthful memory can be our foundation for creating the visions of justice and joy that so many of us seek. There is an old proverb; I forget where it comes from, but I believe it is of Chinese origin:

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.”

I’ve written before about the selective memory so many seem to have with regards Dr. Kings life. Marian Wright Edelman from The Root does a good job of reminding us of the fullness and richness of Dr. King’s legacy:

Too many of us would rather celebrate than follow Dr. King. Some of us have enshrined Dr. King the dreamer, but have ignored Dr. King the disturber of all unjust peace. Many celebrate King the orator, but ignore his words and warnings about the need for reordering the misguided values and priorities he believed to be the seeds of America’s downfall. Many remember King the vocal opponent of violence, but not King who called for massive nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the stockpiling of weapons of death and the wars they fuel.

We choose to ignore his warnings that the excessive materialism of the greedy deprives the needy of the basic necessities of life. And as many of us trivialize or sanitize Dr. King’s words, we would rather build a monument or name a street or school after him than build the new nation and world he called for. His greatness lay in his willingness to struggle to hear and see the truth; to not give into fear, uncertainty and despair; to continue to grow and to never lose hope, despite every discouragement from his government and even his closest friends and advisers.