“There is nothing new in the world except the history we do not know,” said former President Harry S. Truman. Those words resonated with powerful significance April 3, 2009, when Mrs. Naomi King and Dr. Babs Onabanjo debuted in Savannah a preview of the film, A.D. King, Brother to the Dreamer, Behold the Dream. The screenings, sponsored by the Savannah Coastal Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were held at the Telfair Museum Jepson Center for the Arts and the Lake Mayer Community Center on the eve of the forty-first anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination. Whereas Americans generally--and appropriately so—associate the name King with the more famous slain civil rights leader and his widow Coretta Scott King, many are not aware that his brother Rev. Alfred Daniel (A.D.) Williams King also lost his life during the Civil Rights Movement. Although there is some debate over the exact circumstances of A.D. King’s death, one of the most moving moments in the film is fo...

The election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency represents more than one man’s personal political victory. It also in part represents the triumph of the cultural values, diverse spirituality, and enduring legacies of a people who survived centuries of slavery to emerge as a globally influential and celebrated community. Stocks in products exploring and documenting African-American culture have ebbed and flowed since the 1920s-1940s Harlem Renaissance which helped generate and coincided with America’s famous Jazz Age. Interest surged forward again during the 1960s Black Arts Movement and yet again with the more recent boom in Afrocentric literature, in both traditional publishing houses and among independent authors turned publishers, from the 1990s to the present. The impact tends to be a cross-industry one that enhances the quality, productivity, and profitability of different institutions. Universities, high schools, museums, libraries, the film industry, and...

(IP Stanback Museum and Planetarium) It’s probably a safe bet to say that most families are not sitting around their economically-challenged dinner tables these days discussing celebrations of the Bicentennial of the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Pretty much nothing commands our attention spans these days as much as the presidential 2008 election campaign and watching the bouncing ball called Wall Street. And yet in these days when the word “change” can make or break political destiny, it makes sense to pause and acknowledge one of the greatest changes in the history of humanity: It started when Denmark outlawed international slavery in 1802; Great Britain and the United States kept the ball going in 1808. Sweden joined the party in 1813, The Netherlands in 1814, Spain in 1820, and Mexico in 1829. By 1830, where the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was concerned, it was all over but the shouting. Such a huge revolution in a relatively small window––three decades––of historical time...

The notion of rendering service these days is one that most of us generally associate with business enterprises that promise lucrative monetary rewards, or influential political power in exchange for whatever service one might render. Unless affiliated with a religious institution of some kind, it’s rare that we consider service in the manner indicated when the great scholar and humanitarian W.E.B. Du Bois wrote the following: “In the civilized world each serves all, and the binding force is faith and skill, and the skill is bounded only by human possibility and genius, and the faith is faithful even to the untrue.” During this month, September 2008, of the fifth anniversary of the publication of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, I find myself increasingly grateful for the service my co-author and I were able to provide by rising to the challenge of completing the ground-breaking encyclopedia. Initially, I thought only in terms of the personal honor that came from doing so. Since...