New BP HeadCanon: If Erik Stevens was a high-school teacher, he’d show this to his students every Monday morning and Friday afternoon. No one is allowed to complain - well, yeah.
The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.
Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.
Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi. During Reconstruction, fierce resistance from the planters who had dominated antebellum society effectively killed any promise of land or protection from the Freedmen’s Bureau, forcing masses of black laborers back into de facto bondage. But the sheer size of the black population—black people were a majority in Mississippi until the 1930s—meant that thousands were able to secure tenuous footholds as landowners between Emancipation and the Great Depression.
Driven by what W. E. B. Du Bois called “land hunger” among freedmen during Reconstruction, two generations of black workers squirreled away money and went after every available and affordable plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Some found sympathetic white landowners who would sell to them. Some squatted on unused land or acquired the few homesteads available to black people. Some followed visionary leaders to all-black utopian agrarian experiments, such as Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.
It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early 20th century, black people had something to hold on to. In 1900, according to the historian James C. Cobb, black landowners in Tunica County outnumbered white ones three to one. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 25,000 black farm operators in 1910, an increase of almost 20 percent from 1900. Black farmland in Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any state.
The foothold was never secure. From the beginning, even the most enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title to future generations difficult.
You can read the rest of the essay here. It’s pretty lengthy, but a necessary read.
This young Black man is awesome. He looks very cute and professional and I can feel his hunger for success. I definitely advise everyone here to watch more videos of Chicken Connoisseur and I hope he will achieve his goals. I just love THIS KID!
Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan was once a camel trader who led a militia accused of genocidal violence in Darfur. He now sits at the pinnacle of power.
KHARTOUM, Sudan — Once a camel trader who led a militia accused of genocidal violence in Darfur, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan now sits at the pinnacle of power in Sudan, overlooking the scorched streets from his wood-paneled office high up in the military’s towering headquarters.
From his office in the capital, Khartoum, he can see the site where his unit, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, cleared thousands of pro-democracy protesters in a storm of violence that began on June 3.
The heavily armed troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, some dumped in the Nile, according to numerous accounts from protesters and witnesses.
The blood bath consolidated the vertiginous rise of General Hamdan, widely known as Hemeti, who by most reckonings is now the de facto ruler of Sudan. To many Sudanese he is proof of a depressing reality: Although they ousted one dictator in April, the brutal system he left behind is determined to guard its power.
“We thought this might happen,” said Alaa Salah, 22, the woman dressed in white who led chants from atop a car and brought the world’s attention to Sudan’s revolution. “For years Hemeti killed and burned in Darfur. Now Darfur has come to Khartoum.”
For years, General Hamdan was an enforcer for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the brutal dictator who led Sudan for 30 years. When protesters filled the streets in April, roaring for Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster, the military toppled him.
General Hamdan, claiming to support the revolution, abandoned his patron.
But when the protesters refused to disperse, demanding an immediate transition to civilian rule, the generals refused to budge. With power-sharing talks stalled on June 3, the Rapid Support Forces began their crackdown.
Sudanese doctors put the toll at 118 dead.
With international pressure building, General Hamdan, 45, wants to present himself as Sudan’s savior, not its destroyer.
Read more
There’s confirmed reports that people have been beaten, shot, stabbed, raped, and bodies have been tossed into the Nile River….
Yujia Hu, a Chinese chef born in Italy and now based in Milan, has combined food and fashion together in a beautiful blend to present the world with his latest culinary creations, sushi shoes.
Britt Julious remembers going to the nurse’s office in high school and joining the rows of girls lying on cots. They weren’t there because they had a cold or the flu. Like Julious, they were there because of their periods.
“It’s hard to be 15 or 16 years old and you’re trying to pay attention in algebra, and all you can think about is how you want to puke,” Julious, a 31-year-old writer in Chicago, told TODAY.
“I would come home from school because I couldn’t function. I couldn’t sit up in my chair.”
Julious was only 10 years old when she got her period. Soon after, intense cramps began and continued throughout her adolescence into adulthood, when she learned she had uterine fibroids.
Painful periods are a symptom of fibroids, or noncancerous growths in the uterus. But for many women, pain alone isn’t reason to see a doctor. In fact, numerous women told TODAY they were taught that pain is simply part of being a woman.
Now a new wave of doctors and organizations want to tell people that’s not true.
BUT FIRST, WHAT ARE FIBROIDS?
Fibroids are benign tumors in a woman’s uterus. They’re most common during a woman’s childbearing years, but can develop at any age. Fibroids can be as small as a seedling or bigger than a grapefruit, and women can have one, two, three or many.
Fibroids are common but doctors do not know why some women develop them. Genetics play a factor: Women with a family history of fibroids are more likely to develop them. And black women are especially at risk. Up to 80% of black women will develop fibroids before they turn 50, and up to 70% of white women will develop fibroids before they turn 50, according to research. For black women, fibroids are often more severe and occur earlier, according to Dr. Elizabeth Stewart, a fibroids specialist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology and surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
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