The Year of W.E.B. Dubois
Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, marked the 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Dubois’ birth with a special message. “For today’s scholars in history and sociology, his texts remain required reading, just as Freud’s remain central to modern psychology,” said Abu Jamal, in an essay for Prison Radio. The Philadelphia City Council has named 2018 “The Year of W.E.B. Dubois,” who early in his career as a scholar-activist authored a groundbreaking study of the city’s Black population.
Dubois: Activist and Educator
Philadelphia’s Saturday Free School kicked off a year of activities celebrating W.E.B. Dubois’ life and work with a symposium at the Church of the Advocate. “Dubois developed some of the deepest theories when it comes to understanding the human condition,” said public school teacher and Free School activist Ismael Jimenez. “He’s measuring your soul against the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt and pity.” Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford told the crowd: “Dubois believed that Black labor was the central force of the Black movement, and was also the most revolutionary component of labor in the United States.”
Dollar to Get Knocked Off Its Pedestal
Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Anthony Monteiro said the Chinese yuan will topple the dollar from its artificial position as the world’s reserve currency. The rise of the yuan “will redefine the entire architecture of global trade and the relationship of currencies” and “end the special, exorbitant privileges that the U.S. dollar has held since 1971,” when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard.
Sundiata Acoli’s “Affirmation”
Political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, who was arrested with fellow Black Panther Assata Shakur in 1973, is among a host of political prisoners and activists that took part in a reading of Shakur’s poem, “Affirmation,” written in exile in Cuba. Acoli will not be eligible for parole until 2032, when he will be 94 years old. “Affirmation” reads, in part: “I have been locked up by the lawless, handcuffed by the haters, gagged by the greedy, and if I know anything at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall…it can be broken down.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
The treachery of the Black misleadership class knows no bounds. While Trump’s latest racist dog whistle about “born criminals” is condemned, double-talking scoundrels may pretend to be horrified…
The Trump administration’s declaration of war on American cities is a logical escalation of the white supremacist project. This is not a policy shift but a clearer revelation of the settler state's…
“...white paranoia is here to stay/The white boy's scheming night and day/What you think about the King Alfred Plan?”
“Ethiopia just changed the continent of Africa forever.” -African Development Economist and electricity activist
"Department of War: What’s new is so old" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
