Lady Number Nine

Two decisions - 1) this tumblr is no longer anonymous and nameless. Hi, I’m Martine. You’ll see images of me from my stay in Cape Town, South Africa for the next 6 weeks or so. 2) Why “number nine?” I went to a bar last Friday and made 3 new friends. Two of them, a brother and a sister, were nice and toasted. Sister was too drunk to remember names. So she asked me and the person I came with to assign ourselves numbers that she could call us. So now my Capetownian name is “Nine.” Unless it's been reblogged, linked, or captioned as from another source, all photography as of June 2012 is from my personal camera.

[namedatnine]

As much as I can understand Harris’ joy whenever she sees Michelle Obama, I disagree with her position. Yet my disagreement does not immediately align me with those white feminists who find issue with the theme Michelle Obama has adopted during her tenure as First Lady. Michelle Obama choosing motherhood is hardly revolutionary. In fact, her choice of a sobriquet with a militaristic connotation reflects a conservatism and (black) assimilative respectability that aligns itself nicely with the aims of her husband’s administration. A position that seeks to dismantle the very structures that enabled Michelle Obama to eventually decide to “choose” to mother. Moreover, I suggest that if we are looking for a symbol of revolutionary black womanhood in the headlines, it might behoove us to consider Karen Lewis, whose fight for Chicago teachers and students challenges the goals of an administration our First Lady helps personify.

"On Revolutionary Black Womanhood" by Summer M.

[kateoplis]

Classrooms around the World | Guardian (click through for vital stats)

[namedatnine]

How do you collect so many interesting photos and experiences, then have so little of interest to actually say?

[freedominwickedness]

I am growing very tired of having to intervene when white feminists ignorantly lionize Margaret Sanger. Because the reality is that Sanger was an unbelievably racist piece of work — and that’s even going by the benighted standards of her era.

Sanger’s push for birth...

[namedatnine]

I have the polar opposite problem.

I'm constantly having to intervene when black people use Margaret Sanger and Eugenics to argue for ending abortion rights and closing Planned Parenthood clinics. 

Advice on that problem is hard to come by.

[ctulocal1]

My View: Chicago school day: A teacher responds

By Xian Barrett, Special to CNN

This article on the Chicago school day originally appeared on CNN.com. Click here for the original link.

Editor’s note: Xian Barrett teaches law and Chicago history at Gage Park High School...

[wretchedoftheearth]

tacobellfantasy answered your question: IGNORANT QUESTION FOR WHITE PEOPLE: DO YOU USE WASHCLOTHS WHEN YOU BATHE?

loofah as of late, why do you ask? haha

LOL no real reason

People of color on tumblr...

[namedatnine]

It comes from white people that DON'T USE WASHCLOTHES. That's where it comes from.  I recently posted about this in response to that Dave Chappelle screenshot going around -

No lie, this was the first lesson I learned when I went to college. Me + a room of 5 white people = I was the only one that used a washcloth. I have no clue how the topic came up.

Not only that, but they were acting like I was the weird one. Then, just last month, I had this conversation with my white roommate about this topic. She doesn't use a washcloth, and hasn't to her knowledge lived with anyone (and she's lived with a lot of other white people) that uses them either. I pointed out to her that another black woman that stayed with us for a couple of days brought one. I could see the lightbulb turn on above her head.

[unhistorical]

August 28, 1955: Emmett Till is kidnapped and murdered.

The appalling, brutal murder of Emmett Till, a young African-American boy from Chicago, was one of the key events that helped spur the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 600 lynchings (of both blacks and whites) had, according to the Tuskegee Institute, taken place in the state of Mississippi. It was Mississippi that Emmett Till visited in the summer of 1955 to stay with his relatives. 

What exactly transpired that provoked his murder remains uncertain: according to some, Till whistled at a white woman working in a store; according to the woman herself, Till made advances on her using “unprintable” words. He may, in fact, have had a stutter that caused him to make whistling noises while speaking. Whatever the case, it was after this incident that Till was taken from his great-uncle’s home by three men at around 2:00 in the morning and brutally beaten. One of the perpetrators was Roy Bryant, husband of the white woman at whom Emmett Till had allegedly whistled; the other was his half brother J.W. Milam, who claimed to have “never hurt a nigger in [his] life”… except to put them “in their place”. According to a 1956 interview, the men had not intended to kill Till but merely beat and frighten him. How did an attempt to scare a teenage boy turn into murder? An excerpt from that interview:

 I [J.W. Milam] tood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’

Bryant and Milam shot Till by the Tallahatchie River and dumped his body, weighed down with a 35-kg fan from a cotton gin. When Till was discovered in the river three days later, his corpse was unrecognizably disfigured, decomposing and swollen. While the lynching of blacks in the South was rarely covered widely by the media, reaction to the murder of Emmett Till was widespread - and local Mississippian newspapers, along with the state’s governor, outright condemned the murder and murderers. Till’s mother, meanwhile, demanded that her son’s body be displayed in an open-casket funeral, which it was. However, the public’s opinion soon turned more sympathetic towards the murderers, who were both shockingly acquitted of the crime after a little over an hour’s deliberation by the jurors, one of whom joked that if the jury had not taken a break to drink soda, they would have come to a decision even sooner.

In 1956, Bryant and Milam unrepentantly confessed to and described the killing of Emmett Till in a magazine interview. 

[namedatnine]

The white men in the photos are JW Milam and Roy Bryant. One of the women is Carolyn Bryant, who is probably the person most responsible. She is one who ran off to her husband to accuse the 14-year-old boy of whistling at her in the place. I haven't figured out where they are in those photos, but I have a feeling it was right after the not guilty verdict.

In 1955 my mom was 9 years old, my dad 17 years old. How old are the Bryant children, and what are they doing, I wonder. In 2012 when I tell some people that I'm going to visit Mississippi, I see a shudder in their eyes. As much as I love that place, these people and everything they're about is why.

Tagged "reasons to love Chicago" for Mamie Till Mobley's courage, and the South side's response of support for her and for their own futures.

[namedatnine]

super 

secret

sultry

[utnereader-blog]

Neither the family nor the auction company has given a reason for the change, but one can offer a guess. Perhaps it was the thousands of tweets, the scores of news stories, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised in an unprecedented fundraising campaign to buy the land back for the tribes by LastRealIndians.com.

Lise Balk King, on the cancellation of the auction of Pe’Sla. The 1,940 acres in South Dakota’s Black Hills that are sacred to the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation). The Reynolds family, who acquired the land when the US broke a treaty in 1876-7 (when gold was found there), has decided to sell the land privately. “Sale of the Sacred: How Pe’ Sla May Test Uncharted Waters of UNDRIP,” Indian Country Today. (via utnereader)

[wouldyoulikesumanila]

[cheejoekay]

Earl and his dad (famed poet and anti-apatheid activist Keorapetse Kgositsile)

[namedatnine]

Earl Sweatshirt is Korapetse Kgositsile's son??!!! 

About the dad: 

Poet Laureate of South Africa in 2006

Winner of a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote the intro to one of his books

The Last Poets named themselves using one of his poems

Major figure (from exile) in the African National Congress

So now I get why Earl Sweatshirt is so talented so early. BUT, I have a feeling that Korapetse wasn't around to help raise this boy.

[heytoyourmamanem]

Untitled

from the East Baltimore Documentary Survey Project

Baltimore, Maryland, ca. 1975

Elinor Cahn, photographer

[namedatnine]

Black children selling fruit? I know there must be very specific and policy-related reasons why you don't see this anymore in E. Baltimore. 

[staysuckafree]

BERRY

[kilele-blog]

SIPHO HLONGWANE & GREG MARINOVICH visit the camp next to Marikana shaft of the Lonmin Mine to talk to the workers.

Photography by Greg Marinovich

“Having been failed by the unions, the platinum company they worked for, and the government, the furious residents of the small squatter camp next to the Marikana shaft of the Lonmin Platinum Mine turned to someone outside of the system for comfort: Julius Malema. He said exactly what they had wanted to hear all along: they are victims of a vicious company, conniving unions and uncaring politicians. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a few of the miners allowed us a tiny peek into their lives. It was heartbreaking. By SIPHO HLONGWANE (words) & GREG MARINOVICH (images).”

Top: Striking Lonmin miners gathered to have a meeting to discuss the deaths of some 34 of their colleagues two days previosly. They were addressed by strike leaders and the expelled African National Congress youth league leader Julius Malema. Malema attacked President Zuma and called for his removal, as well as that of police minister Nathi Mtetwa. Wonderkop, Marikana, North West Province. August 18, 2012. (Greg Marinovich)

Middle Left: A rock drill operator who earns just R4,350 a month in his shack at Wonderkop shantytown. Wonderkop, Marikana, North West Province. August 18, 2012. (Greg Marinovich)

Middle Right: One of the leaders of the striking Lonmin miners weeps during an impassioned narration of the events that saw several of his fellow leaders killed. Wonderkop, Marikana, North West Province. August 18, 2012. (Greg Marinovich)

Bottom: One of the leaders of the striking Lonmin miners collapses after the speech. Wonderkop, Marikana, North West Province. August 18, 2012. (Greg Marinovich)

[milkypuhtatoes]

“I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go.”

—Mark Ryden

100% agree

(via annmuddy)

^ditto

(via gentlethrills)

this is my life. i tend to get my vitamin d in the afternoon.

[iamjadehager]

This was the short film district 9 was based on. I just thought it would be cool to share.

[thingsipedia]

Street Art by Faith47 from Cape Town, South Africa » Design You Trust

[globalwhitney-blog]

[namedatnine]

My time in Cape Town has been about enjoying natural beauty. My time in Johannesburg was about social beauty. Ugliness exists in both spaces...but the people of Jozi were just warmer. I hope it is still that way. I won't find out this trip.