#africanamericans

[ptseti]

They won’t teach you in school that many Black American towns, businesses, banks, schools, people, and generational wealth created immediately after slavery were destroyed by white people.

[tubbsmccracken]

Frederick McKinley Jones was a prolific early 20th century black inventor who helped to revolutionize both the cinema and refrigeration industries. Between 1919 and 1945 he patented more than sixty inventions in divergent fields with forty of those patents in refrigeration. He is best known for inventing the first automatic refrigeration system for trucks.

[portraitsofsaints]

Saint Katharine Drexel

1858 -1955

Feast Day: March 3

Patronage: Philanthropists, racial justice

One of the 12 American Saints, St. Katharine Drexel was an American heiress, philanthropist, religious sister, educator, and foundress. Taking religious vows in 1891, she is known for her selfless service of the oppressed. Donating her life and considerable fortune to the betterment and education of others with an avid interest in Native American and African-American peoples. “The patient and humble endurance of the cross - whatever nature it may be - is the highest work we have to do.” ~ St. Katharine Drexel

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)

[ai-bees]

Take a Moment to Celebrate Their Accomplishments!👆😃✨

There's no question that African Americans have made significant contributions to the tech industry.👌

In the above infographic, there are founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders in their field and each of them has a unique success story ✊, which has led them today to where they are today. 

Also, click to read the full story of one such 👉 Inspiring Black Investor and Founder: Hamet Watt!

[atacxgymcapoeira]

They are trying to steal from us our beautiful ALKEBULAN ( miscalled Africa by the Romans ). Our ALKEBULAN is the largest. Most minerally diverse. And most beautiful continent in the world. All of the rest of the world depends upon us to survive. We Afrikans of The Diaspora must return home and protect her, because already the colonizers are pouring their citizens into our comtinent where they're being racist against us and disrespectful of us in our own lands...whike they're taking our money abd resources and getting rich off of and from us! These evil colonizers from Europe and China are polluting our continental lands and trying to find ways to permanently strip her of her natural resources, while keeping us economically mentally and literally enslaved worldwide. All good people must unite to fight and halt their depredations! But. We Black be worldwide must initiate maintain and be victorious in this fight, even if nobody else joins us. That's why we need our #blackmartialarts and #blackmartialartists #africa #nigeria #respect #blackpride #africans #africanamericans #ghana #diaspora #africanstyle #motherland #melaninpoppin #blackathletes #blackmillionaires #melaninmagic #resources #atacxgymnation #atacxgymstreetwarrior #atacxgymkenpo #atacxgymstreetwarriors #kipura #smaitawi #bigfacts #africanamazing #africangiant #atacxgym #atacxgymcapoeira #attacklife #atacxgymstreetwarriorcapoeira WEBSITE/SITE: https://sites.google.com/view/atacxgymcapoeira/home INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/atacxgymcapoeira/, TWITTER: https://twitter.com/atacxgym, BLOG: atacxgymcapoeira.blogspot.com :FACEBOOK GROUP PAGE: https://www.facebook.com/groups/capoeiraselfdefensethatworks/ FACEBOOK PERSONAL ATACX GYM PAGE: https://www.facebook.com/AtacxGymStreetWarriorCapoeira https://www.instagram.com/p/Camy2Snl8Ly/?utm_medium=tumblr

[kemetic-dreams]

Possessed: Voodoo’s Origins and Influence from the Blues to Britney

Blissed-out, ecstatic union with our divine selves — we seek it at raves and rock concerts, and in the desert with the Burning Man. I try to get there when I’m jamming with my band — but I didn’t realize until I wrote The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu how much this longing relates to West African spirituality, and the Voodoo concept of possession.

Vodou (the proper Kreyol/Creole spelling of Voodoo) is a neo-African religion that evolved in the New World from the 6000-year-old West African religion Vodun. This was the religion of many slaves brought from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.

Vodun was brutally repressed by slave-owners, yet its powerful beats, ethics and aesthetics endured. We owe our concepts of cool, soul and rock and roll to it.

The roots of rock are in a West African word for dance — rak. As Michael Ventura wrote in his important essay on rock music, “Hear that Long Snake Moan”:

The Voodoo rite of possession by the god became the standard of American performance in rock’n’roll. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison, Johnny Rotten, Prince — they let themselves be possessed not by any god they could name but by the spirit they felt in the music. Their behavior in this possession was something Western society had never before tolerated.

Vodou possession is not the hokey demon-possession of zombie movies; it’s a state of union with the divine achieved through drumming, dancing and singing. It’s becoming “filled with the Holy Ghost” in the Pentecostal Christian tradition or attaining yogic bliss through the practice of kirtan, singing the names of God — Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.

In the Yoruba culture of West Africa, being able to connect with one’s inner divinity is called coolness (itutu). In Yoruba morality, generosity indicates coolness and is the highest quality a person can exhibit. In American culture, we say that nice person is cool, or that a musician “has got soul.” We notice “Southern hospitality.”

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade carried these ideas to the New World, particularly as slavers burrowed inward from Senegambia on the West African coast to the Kingdom of Dahomey, a Vodun stronghold.

Dahomey spread across much of today’s Togo, Benin and Nigeria and was heavily involved in the slave trade. Vodun practitioners were shipped overseas by the thousands when the Fon people of Benin conquered their neighbors, the Ewe, in 1729. Many Fon were also kidnapped and traded into slavery in exchange for textiles, weapons, brass pots, Venetian beads and other European goods.

Vodun is a Fon-Ewe word meaning God or Great Spirit. This supreme creator was represented as the giant snake Dan carrying the universe in its coils. Today, in Haiti and American Vodou strongholds like New Orleans, Dan is worshiped as Damballah, the Grand Zombie (the Bantu word nzambi means God). He’s John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake”.

Branching off from this almighty God-force are spirit-gods called loa. During Vodou ceremonies, a loa may descend the center post of the temple to possess or “ride” a worshiper who has reached a sufficiently high state of consciousness. The morality implicit in this is stated in the Haitian proverb, “Great gods cannot ride little horses.”

Vodun practices like drumming were definitely noticed by nervous colonists who had imported fierce warriors and tribal priests to work their farms. After a deadly rebellion in the South Carolina colony in 1739, the colonists realized slaves were using talking drums to organize resistance. The Slave Act of 1740 in South Carolina barred slaves from using “drums, horns, or other loud instruments.” Other colonies followed suit with legislation like the severe Black Codes of Georgia.

Soon, religious repression was in full swing. Slaves caught praying were brutally penalized, as this excerpt from Peter Randolph’s “Slave Cabin to the Pulpit” recounts:

In some places, if the slaves are caught praying to God, they are whipped more than if they had committed a great crime. Sometimes, when a slave, on being whipped, calls upon God, he is forbidden to do so, under threat of having his throat cut, or brains blown out.

Vodun practitioners taken as slaves to plantations in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and Jamaica were also prohibited from practicing their religion. But enslaved Vodun priests arriving in the Catholic West Indies quickly grasped similarities between their tradition of appealing to loa to intercede with God, and Catholics praying to saints for intercession. By superimposing Catholic saints over the loa, slaves created the hybrid religions Santeria (saint worship) in the Spanish Islands, Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.

On Aug. 22, 1791, Haitian slaves revolted on a signal from Vodou priests, who consulted their oracle to determine which military strategies would succeed. The revolutionaries defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and declared independence Jan. 1, 1804, establishing Haiti as the world’s first black republic. Freaked by a successful slave revolt, the United States and Western Europe slapped economic sanctions on Haiti, turning the prosperous colony into an impoverished state that could no longer sell the products of its fields.

In 1809, Vodou arrived in the United States en masse when Haitian slave owners who had fled to Cuba with their slaves were expelled. Most relocated from Cuba to New Orleans, nearly doubling the city’s size in one year. Today, 15 percent of New Orleans practices Vodou, and it’s popular in other U.S. cities with African and Haitian communities.

Among the arriving Haitians was Marie Laveau. She became the leader of New Orleans Vodou practitioners in 1820 when she was elected the human representative of the Grand Zombie. (Former White House Social Secretary Desirée Rogers is descended from Marie Laveau.)

Laveau kept a python named Zombi, and danced with it on her shoulders while presiding over ceremonies. This image was appropriated, with other Vodou nods, for Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” performance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards.

The sensationalistic 1884 book Haiti or the Black Republic by Sir Spencer St. John, slammed Vodou as an evil cult, with gruesome descriptions of human sacrifice and black magic — some of which had been extracted from Vodou priests via torture. It became a popular source for the Hollywood screenwriters who began churning out voodoo horror flicks in the 1930s.

The first musician to bring pop-Voodoo imagery to the stage was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who would rise from a coffin onstage with a bone in his nose. Hawkins had intended for his hit record “I Put A Spell On You”  to be a soulful ballad. But once the producer “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, we came out with this weird version,” Hawkins admitted, adding “I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.” Hawkins kicked off the undead craze among rockers like Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson.  

Meanwhile, despite the severe repression, Vodun practices crept into Southern black churches.  Descriptions of black Baptist church services in the late 1800s and early 1900s depict the congregation dancing in a circle in a “rock” or “ring shout” as they follow the deacon, who bears a standard.

It was the deacon’s job to whip parishioners into a frenzy of fainting and speaking in tongues called “rocking the church.” The concept of a deity “riding” with a worshiper transferred to these Christian churches, where the cry “Drop down chariot and let me ride!” was often heard, as well as “Ride on!” and “Ride on, King Jesus!” This became the solidarity shout, “Right on!”

Blues singers fronting big bands, like Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, copied the way church solo singers belted over the choir. The radio beamed this new “shouting blues” all over black America. It was picked up by country blues singers like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, who had moved to Chicago and used it with their new electrified bands. These, in turn, inspired rockers like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones

Africans brought here as slaves carried with them incredibly strong aesthetic, ethical and cultural values that not only withstood the shock of their forced transplantation to the New World, but transformed and invigorated it. Their influence made us uniquely American. It’s why we respond to that Voodoo beat.

[diallokenyatta]

Why so many of our people say we not Africans?

There are a few reasons and most people who deny that they are Africans suffer from a combination of these reasons...

Mentacide: this is the systematic destruction of a group's mind with the ultimate goal being the extirpation of that groups. Menatacide renders its victims Ahistorical, Anti-Analytical, and Anti-Academic. So if a person suffers from Metacide they are prone to reject that fact that they are African. Also, most other the reason that an African person who lives in the Diaspora would deny their African lineage.

Self-Hate, Self-Rejection: Many people from oppressed populations internalize the hatred they are subjected to and begin to mimic the behaviors of their oppressors and regurgitate the lies their oppressors promote.

Delusion: There are many myths about the origins of Black people in the US mostly promoted by cults like the Moors and the Hebrew Israelite. If a person is susceptible to religious myths they tend to also be receptive to historical myths as well.

They are Dishonest: Many people who deny know we are Africans, that we are members of the African Diaspora but lie. They are people who take advantage of other Black people who suffer from Mentacide, Self-Hate, and Delusions. They create cults and organizations based about falsified Black identities and exploit people who want to escape the shame of enslavement, colonization, and oppression.

Shame: African people are oppressed, our people are under neocolonialism on the African continent, and we are under racist oppression and discrimination in the African Diaspora across the globe. Some African seek to escape the shame and pain of the Global African predicament by pretending that they are not Africans, instead of organizing to liberate their people.

[atc-grup34]

Centres de jeux et de divertissement pour les pays africains [phone] [phone] #africanprincess #africanhairstyles #africangrey #africanature #africanwildlife #africanhistory #africanart #africanattire #africatotheworld #africadosul #africanwildlifephotography #africanspirituality #africanamericans #africancichlids (African Village) https://www.instagram.com/p/CVcEYGOIGSY/?utm_medium=tumblr