#maya cunningham

[asg-stuff]

Smithsonian Folkways Black History Month playlist presents a provocative sound collage of the African American experience that captures the groups earliest history on the African continent into the Black Power period of the 1970s. (via A Black History Sound Collage, Documenting The Progression of Black American History | Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)

[profkew]

A People in Flight: African Americans in Movement

African Americans have historically been a people in motion. The Africans who arrived in the thirteen colonies were forced to leave their ho

"African Americans have historically been a people in motion. The Africans who arrived in the thirteen colonies were forced to leave their homes in various African kingdoms and empires, where they were citizens, to become non-citizens in the chattel slavery of the United States. Before and after emancipation, some African Americans emigrated back to the African continent, to Liberia, and other countries. The Great Migration of the early 1900s marked another major demographic shift of African America, when millions of Black Americans moved from The South to Northern and Western cities. Most recently, thousands of African Americans pilgrimaged to Ghana in 2019, invited by the country’s “Year of Return” commemoration of the 400-year anniversary of the first Africans enslaved in the Virginia colony in 1619. This historical motion has either provoked or been driven by African Americans' response to anti-Black racism, social injustice, slavery and colonialism. Social movement ideologies, physical relocation and bodily protests have been historically entwined. After all, enslavement was about forced relocation and captivity. Black people resisted by insisting on freedom that moved them to physically protest through escape and other surreptitious activity. This pattern continues throughout Black history. Movement and motion, a remapping of African America in geographical and mental spaces. A people in flight. This 2022 Smithsonian Black History Playlist uses music, poetry, interviews and archival footage to show the relationship between the migration and the ideological and social movements of Black America. It is divided into four sections - Flying From, Flying In, Flying Free and Flying Home - that capture the group’s movements for freedom."