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Sun Ra

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Girls in Harlem, 1964. Photo by Larry Fink

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Atlanta airport, 1956. Photo by Gordon Parks.

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Carmen, holding a Zendit camera. Orchard Park, 1984, photo by Ricky Flores.

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Mom and sons, Detroit, 1942, photo by Todd Webb.

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Albert Ayler Quintet outside of the famous club Slugs, Avenue A in NYC, May, 1966. Left to right Donald Ayler, Albert Ayler, Ron Shannon Jackson, Lewis Worrell and Michel Samson.

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Young man in front of Lowe’s movie theater in Harlem, 1976. Photo by Dawoud Bey

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Maxwell Street Flea Market, Chicago, Illinois, September 9, 1955

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A journalist, radical activist, and theoretician, George Padmore did more than perhaps any other single individual to shape the theory and discourse of Pan-African anti-imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born Malcolm Nurse in Trinidad in 1901, Padmore moved to the United States in 1925  to study at Fisk and Howard Universities. In 1928 he dropped out of Howard’s law school and joined the American Communist Party. Quickly rising in Party ranks as an expert on race and imperialism, Padmore moved to Moscow, USSR in 1929 to head the Comintern’s International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and to edit the Negro Worker. In 1931 he published the influential pamphlet, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. In 1933 the Comintern suspended publication of the Negro Worker and disbanded the Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, prompting Padmore to split acrimoniously with the Party. In subsequent years Padmore would become a fervent anti-Communist, denouncing the Comintern’s alleged manipulation of black freedom struggles in his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism? However, throughout his life, he continued to unite with activists and trade unionists on the radical left around the issue of anti-colonialism.

Padmore settled in London, UK in 1936. There he helped foster a radical milieu of Pan-Africanist intellectuals that included Padmore’s childhood friend, the Trotskyist theorist C.L.R. James. In 1936 Padmore published How Britain Rules Africa, followed a year later by Africa and World Peace. Along with I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, Padmore and James founded the International African Service Bureau in 1937. Padmore guided the bureau through the late 1930s and early 1940s until in merged into the Pan-African Federation in 1944. He was a principal organizer of the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945, which helped lay the foundation for postwar African colonial liberation movements. Throughout this period Padmore’s articles and essays were printed regularly in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and The Crisis, as well as in newspapers throughout Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Padmore’s international journalism and other writings linked African American struggles with liberation movements in Africa and with African Diaspora peoples around the world and thus had a profound effect on the contours of black political thought.

George Padmore spent his final years in newly independent Ghana as an advisor and mentor to Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He died in London in 1959.”

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Lee “Scratch” Perry

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Cuban President Fidel Castro, accompanied by President Julius Nyerere  of Tanzania, discusses a point with a Cuban worker during visit to a Cuban-aided agriculture school. Castro apologized to Tanzania for not being able to provide that African nation with more aid, saying his country's resources are tied up elsewhere in Africa, namely Angola, helping the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in their fight for independence from Portugal.

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The police moved in before dawn.

Their target was a first-floor apartment on Chicago’s West Side. Among those inside were two top leaders of the Illinois Black Panther Party — chairman Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Officers assigned to Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan approached the dwelling with a warrant authorizing a search for illegal weapons. Gunfire — police claimed they faced a barrage from inside the apartment — erupted shortly after the raid began at 4:45 a.m.

When the shooting stopped, Hampton, 21, and Clark, 22, were dead. Four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded. Seven Panthers in the residence were charged with attempted murder.

The Dec. 4, 1969, confrontation at 2337 W. Monroe St. ended quickly, but the controversy over what exactly happened — fought over in the pages of the city’s newspapers, on local TV and in the courts — reverberated for years to come.  (Photo below: Chicago police remove the body of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was slain in a gun battle with police on Chicago’s West Side on Dec. 4, 1969.)

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Amiri Baraka (winner of the JJA's 2012 Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award) with Bertha Hope at the Jazz Journalists Association's 2013 Jazz Awards party at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City, June 19, 2013. Photo by Fran Kaufman.

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Ella Fitzgerald, her assistant. Georgiana Henry, Illinois Jacquet, and Dizzy Gillespie, all dressed to the nines in Houston Police Department holding cell. Ella Fitzgerald with her assistant in a Houston PD holding cell after she and fellow great Dizzy Gillespie were arrested for “throwing dice” in Fitzgerald’s dressing room at the Houston Music Hall, 1955.

Fitzgerald and Gillespie were performing in Houston at the Music Hall as part of Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, which included other jazz legends like Buddy Rich, Oscar Peterson, Gene Krupa and Lester Young. Saxophonist Jacquet — also on the bill — was the prime mover in bringing the show to Houston and making sure the concert (which featured both black and white musicians) would be integrated.

Two shows were scheduled that night. The raid took place before the end of the first concert.

According to the Houston Chronicle:

Vice squad officers said three of the five — Dizzie Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet and Georgiana Henry — were actually crooning to the bones when police walked into Ella Fitzgerald’s dressing room back-stage at the Music Hall.

Miss Fitzgerald and show producer Norman Granz were “just present” in the back-stage dressing room while the jazz show was going on in the Music Hall, the officers said.

However, all were taken to the police station and charged. They posted $10 bonds.

The Houston Post said Fitzgerald dabbed tears from her eyes as she was being booked.

“I have nothing to say,” she told reporters. “What is there to say? I was only having a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.”

The Post continued:

Sgt. W.A. Scotton said saxophonist Jacquet had the dice in his hand as the troop of officers walked in. The troop confiscated the dice and $185 in cash. Then they agreed to wait until the first show was over before taking the performers to the police station.

Mr. Jacquet, the saxophone man, was the most nonchalant of those arrested. He told reporters his name was Louis Armstrong.

The group didn’t stay at the police station for long. In fact, they made it back in time for the second show, leaving audiences unaware of what had taken place.

Of course, one finds it highly suspicious that vice officers would bust the five of them on a night meant to show how smoothly Houston audiences could integrate. The vice officers weren’t the only officers at the concert as eight other uniformed officers were hired to work security that night. In Gillespie’s autobiography, Granz says one of the vice officers even threatened him during the raid after he accused the officer of trying to plant drugs in a bathroom at the Music Hall.

The next day, police Chief Jack Heard said officers were probably a little overzealous in going after the performers.

“We want to enforce the law but common sense should apply,” he told the Post.

The charges were eventually dismissed.

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This astonishing 18ft drawing of the world’s most famous skyline was created by autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire after he spent just 20 minutes in a helicopter gazing at the panorama.The unbelievably intricate picture was drawn at Brooklyn’s prestigious Pratt Institute from Stephen’s memory, with details of every building sketched in to scale.Landmarks including the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building can be seen towering above smaller buildings after just three days in his spellbinding creation.Listening intently to his ipod throughout the artistic process - because music helps him - London-born Stephen uses only graphic pens as he commits his photographic memory to the high-grade paper.Invited by top U.S. television network CBS to display his talents to the American public in a new screen appearance this week, Stephen has dumbfounded art lovers around the globe with sketches of Tokyo, Rome and Hong Kong.‘Stephen sketches his layout in pencil first and then scales it within the border, first adding in landmarks before filling out in more intricate detail,’ said Iliana Taliotis, who works with Stephen and his family.‘He works methodically in short sharp bursts and is even being put on webcam by CBS as he puts his art to paper.’  On his third visit to New York, this is Stephen's first panorama of the world's most iconic cityscape.‘Stephen feels this is his spiritual home,’ said Iliana.‘There are many similarities between his home, London, and New York that he can relate to.   ‘The only difference is that everything is on a bigger scale and with taller, more modern buildings.  ‘Cities have always been his passion, and he is drawn to cosmopolitan lifestyles.’   Diagnosed with autistism at an early age, Stephen's talent for drawing emerged as a way of expressing himself.Using his drawing's to help him learn and encouraged by his family, Stephen created a series of 26 coded pictures to help him speak, all of which corresponded to a letter in the alphabet.Going through up to 12 pens during his sketches which can take a week to finish, Stephen also draws heavily on music which he carries everywhere.He listens to everything through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, including blues, soul, funk, Motown, pop, Back Street Boys, All Saints and even New Kids on the Block.He always listens to music while he works,’ said Iliana.‘This work will encompass the five boroughs of New York, New Jersey, Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty.‘This one is extra special and unique.  ‘Due to his personal love of New York it contains far more detail and the perspective of the panorama is much more in-depth, giving a more realistic, 3-D view of the city.’In May 2005, Stephen produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo on a 52-foot canvas within seven days following a short helicopter ride over the city. Since then he has drawn Rome, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Jerusalem and London on giant canvasses. When Wiltshire took the helicopter ride over Rome, he drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Pantheon.In 2006, Stephen Wiltshire was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to art. He opened his permanent gallery in the Royal Opera Arcade, Pall Mall, the same year. (FROM THE DAILY MAIL REPORTER, October 29, 2009)Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Autistic-artist-draws-18ft... Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

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BILLY ECKSTINE’s BADASSS BAND

(l-r) Art Blakey, Tommy Potter, Budd Johnson, Junior Williams, Fats Navarro, Chips Outcalt, Billy Eckstine and Gene Ammons.