For the more sensitive souls among us, the notion of monetizing and exporting racism is too obscene to think about, especially in today’s unceasingly polarized social and political environment. It is painful to acknowledge that some human beings have it in their character to behave with such callously predatory disregard. But it is every bit as much a growing trend as fake news and movies featuring characters from the Marvel Universe or DC Comics. So what does that even mean? Very possibly that an already-volatile situation in #America and elsewhere in our otherwise magnificent Global Village is on its way to becoming worse before it gets better.  I will contend that one of the benefits of having had an African-American president in the White House for the past eight years has been his calming influence upon other Blacks as #videos continued to accumulate showing one black man, woman, or child after another shot and killed by someone under highly-questionable (or painfull

An unidentified Black Man stands outside a tent in Tulsa’s previously-affluent Greenwood District. Following the 1921 riot many African American survivors were forced to live for months in tents and other makeshift accommodations. (photograph courtesy of the Black Holocaust Society) Most of us have seen a filmed interview or 2 where an African-American veteran of World War I or World War II talks about how they had to fight one war overseas and then returned home to fight a different kind of war—for equal civil rights—here in America. What many of us may not know is how truly war-like some of the confrontations at home could become. It is because of what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 30-June 1, 1921, and past those dates that many people’s thoughts turn to a different kind of commemoration when observing Memorial Day every year. I was unaware of the event that has become known as the Black Wall Street Riots until conducting research to write Encyclopedia  of the Ha

Incumbent Mayor of Savannah, Georgia (USA) Edna B. Jackson . (photo courtesy of Diva Magazine). Journalist Patricia C. Stumb, in a 1999 Connect Savannah news magazine story titled “Peace, love & blessings…,” wrote of how I “found worldly consciousness in the heart of [my] hometown.” Her observation was surprisingly precise because during that period while living in Savannah, Georgia, I had indeed become more aware of my hometown on the global scale of things. I had also become more cognizant of myself as an author whose influences and inspirations tended often to derive from regions far beyond it. However, expanded consciousness or not, there was no such thing as overlooking the profound thematic shift that occurred in the city’s history when Floyd Adams became its first African-American mayor in 1996. That event prompted the composition of these lines: By way of an African wind a letter came today. It was not scribbled over Hallmark fantasies or popcultur

If you’re a regular reader of my national African-American cultural arts column, you may have noticed that I have not been posting articles as frequently as I once did. The reason is simple enough. Having reached a certain point in the research for my current book-in-progress (at least one of them anyway) I had to reduce as many additional writing obligations as possible to fully concentrate on completion of the work. For me, this is the part of authorship when the lyrical muse sings and the creative pen dances. The greater bulk of the more rigid tasks of verification and documentation have been satisfied, and imagination may be allowed to take over the processes of narrative construction. The resulting musical flow of image and language stamp the work with its own unique identity. And its own self-defined meanings destined to merge with different readers’ interpretations of the same. The Writer and the Times I started the national African-American  cultural arts colu