lightleaks

"Please don't dominate the rap jack, if you got nothin' new to say"

[npr]

Daryl Davis is a blues musician, but he also has what some might call an interesting hobby. For the past 30 years, Davis, a black man, has spent time befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan.

He says once the friendship blossoms, the Klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided. Since Davis started talking with these members, he says 200 Klansmen have given up their robes. When that happens, Davis collects the robes and keeps them in his home as a reminder of the dent he has made in racism by simply sitting down and having dinner with people.

How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes

Photo: Courtesy of Daryl Davis

[ultrafacts]

[staff]

[richardjswan]

Thunderstorm - Colorado Springs

[icphoto]

Barbara Morgan is best known for the vibrancy of her dance photographs. #HappyBirthday 📷 Martha Graham - “Letter to the World,” 1940 http://buff.ly/29sBu6G

[richardjswan]

My brother worked for Barbara for several years and I spent time in her studio. One visit she have my sister and I signed prints that were later lost in a burglary.

[psych2go]

If you like psychology tidbits, follow me maybe? @psych2go.

[rollingstone]

Bob Dylan released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 53 years ago today. Here’s an inside look at the album where Dylan channeled love, politics and his passion for archaic folk music into songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

[icphoto]

[richardjswan]

1996 Lincoln Town Car Diamond Anniversary Edition. One of 1000 produced. My recent find on Craigslist, in near mint condition. 

[rhubarbes]

Schorem Haarsnijder En Barbier

[lolalamashermosa]

The last posting of my ceramic work for at least two weeks while I’m away! I’m sure I’ll find a way to post my travel photos while I’m in Peru so stay tuned. For now I leave you with this lovely experiment of which I can’t wait to try more. All it takes is a bisqued piece of clay and some smoke!!! No kiln or glazing for this finish. (at CCSU Ceramics)

[richardjswan]

I hope you can share how you did this - stunning!

[newshour]

NewsHourSoundBytes

Ghanian singer Azizaa Mystic’s new video “Black Magic Woman” begins with a scene of two Christian missionaries trying to convert a woman. Mystic’s music renounces Christianity’s influence on Ghana, where more than 71.2 percent of people identify as Christian, and turns back to Ghana’s traditional religions and sounds. The sound of “Black Magic Woman” is influenced by Ghana’s Ewe drumming and Agbadza and also draws on 808 drums and trap music. “Everything is really inspired from the traditional sound,” she told the NewsHour.

Read more.

[richardjswan]

Jesus, protect me from your followers....

[npr]

“A young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station,” wrote Toni Morrison in the invitation to a posthumous book-launch party she threw for the writer in 1974, six years after he died. “A transit cop” — who was white — “shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.”

In the nearly 50 years since Henry Dumas was killed, not much more has come to light about what happened on the night of his death. No witnesses came forward to testify. Police records were lost in a bureaucratic shuffle. Harlem, where Dumas moved as a young man after growing up in rural Arkansas, had erupted in large-scale protests over the police killings of black and brown men several times before the writer was killed. But Dumas’ death hardly made the news. With so little information to draw from, it’s as if the last pages of his life were torn out.

“His work and, in fact, his death, investigated and illustrated the ways in which black lives were at best peripheral to most white people — especially those running and policing the country,” says James Smethurst, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst professor who has written extensively about 1960s and ‘70s black writers. Much of Dumas’ writing is considered to be a part of the Black Arts Movement — the artistic manifestation of the Black Power struggle of the 1960s — an effort that Smethurst believes has a lot of resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement. While interest in Dumas has increased somewhat in recent years, he says, “We still have a long way to go before he gets the sort of attention he deserves.”

Henry Dumas Wrote About Black People Killed By Cops. Then He Was Killed By A Cop

Photos: Courtesy of Eugene B. Redmond 

[skunkbear]

[skunkbear]

This is a picture of the sun, created by looking through earth.

It wasn’t made with light though. The image visualizes the flux of neutrinos coming from the Sun. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles created in the nuclear furnace of the sun, and they can pass through nearly anything. Billions of neutrinos shoot through our bodies every second, and they fly with ease through the rocky bulk of the earth.

Scientists have built a giant neutrino observatory in an abandoned mine shaft 3,000 ft below Mount Kamioka in Japan (all that rock shelter the sensors from the noise of cosmic rays). It’s called the Super-Kamiokande - and it’s essentially a 13 million gallon tank of ultra-pure water, rigged with sensors that can detect the extremely weak interaction of neutrinos with other matter.

One of scientists on this project, Takaaki Kajita, has just won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Sun image: Robert Svoboda and K. Gordan, Super-K image: courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institue for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo

[npr]

This is definitely the coolest “camera” I’ve ever seen. -Emily

[richardjswan]

Wow - a photo not taken with a phone

[labellavita9-blog]

[ultrafacts]

She was known as “Queen Bess”. She was Invited to important events and often interviewed by newspapers. She performed in air shows and was admired by the public.

A public library in Chicago was named in Coleman’s honor, as are roads at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Oakland International Airport in Oakland, California, Tampa international airport in Florida, and at Frankfurt International Airport. 

Bessie Coleman Middle School in Cedar Hill in Texas is named for her.

Bessie Coleman Boulevard in Waxahachie, Texas, (where she lived as a child) is named in her honor.

B. Coleman Aviation, a Fixed Base Operator based at Gary/Chicago International Airport is named in her honor.

Several Bessie Coleman Scholarship Awards have been established for high school seniors planning on careers in aviation.

The U.S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent stamp honoring Coleman in 1995. The Bessie Coleman Commemorative is the 18th in the U.S. Postal Service Black Heritage series.

In 2006, she was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, arguably aviation’s most prestigious honor.

Source

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[nprfreshair]

‘Policing The Police’: How The Black Panthers Got Their Start

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1966, a group of six black men in Oakland, Calif., came together in an effort to curb police brutality against African-Americans in the city. Because of a quirk in California law, the men were able to carry loaded weapons openly. The Black Panthers, as they became known, would follow the police around, jumping out of their cars with guns drawn if the police made a stop.

“They would observe the police and make sure that no brutality occurred,” filmmaker Stanley Nelson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “What they were really doing was policing the police.”

Nelson, who chronicles the Panther movement in his new documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, says the group was a response to what some saw as the limitations of the non-violent civil rights movement.

“When the Panthers came into being, there were a number of people, especially young people, who kind of felt that the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King … had run its course,” Nelson says. “It had gotten what it could get, and something else was needed; new tactics were needed.”

Photo: Members of the Black Panthers line up at a rally at DeFremery Park in Oakland, Calif. Courtesy of Stephen Shames and Firelight Media