theblackbottom

Interview by ANDREW GOLDMAN
Published: September 21, 2012
You once wrote that Michael Jackson stopped working with you because he felt threatened by the credit you were getting for his music. Considering he was never able to repeat the success he had with “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad,” how much credit do you deserve?
Well, What [...]

Emberly Vick, otherwise known as Emberly “The Writer,” admits that she passively ignored relentless urges to write for years. Still, whether explaining a concept or conceptualizing herself, she was clearly ordained to write at an early age.
Excelling in state writing tests in elementary, “TheWriter” never considered writing, not even as a hobby, until college. After [...]

Source: Shadow and the Act, IndieWire
FREE ANGELA is a work-in-progress feature-length documentary about Angela Davis and the high stakes crime, political movement, and trial that catapults the 26 year-old newly appointed philosophy professor at the University of California at Los Angeles into a seventies revolutionary political icon.
Nearly forty years later, and for the first time, [...]

Source: Wikepedia
Margaret Walker was born to Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister, and Marion Dozier Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. Her family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young girl. She attended school there, including several years of college, before she moved north. [...]

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read~Mary McCleod Bethune
Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!~Frederick Douglass

REVIEW
Randal Maurice Jelks is an Associate Professor of American Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies. He is co-editor of the journal American Studies and a co-founder and [...]

Source: NY Times
The Rev. H. H. Brookins, a retired bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church whose role as a civil rights leader and a political kingmaker was clouded by accusations of financial chicanery, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Michael Ellison-Lewis, a spokesman for the church, [...]

DAVID W. BLIGHT and ALLISON SCHARFSTEIN
Source: New York Times
ON May 17, 1962, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an extraordinary manifesto to the White House. Constructed as both a moral appeal and a legal brief, the 64-page document called on President John F. Kennedy to issue a “second Emancipation Proclamation,” an [...]

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read~Mary McCleod Bethune
Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!~Frederick Douglass
REVIEW
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. [...]

Dear Sisters in Struggle,
I have been thinking a great deal lately about the struggles of black men. This is not to say I have not thought of the struggles of women or the declining fortunes of the American middle class or the working class or the poor in general, I have.  My letter to you [...]

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read~Mary McCleod Bethune
Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!~Frederick Douglass

REVIEW Mark Long is a video game designer and producer living in Seattle. The Silence of Our Friends in based on Long’s childhoold experiences with the civil rights movement in suburban [...]