#mulatto beats

[imperatordavianus-blog]

A commission that I have done with Ogameet.

A mulatto woman with ginormous boobs couldn't handle the power of love in her engorged Enlarged Heart. So her lover just removed the beating behemoth from her chest.

[thechanelmuse]

How genealogy is used to track Black family histories

Our names are important to us. They tell us who we are and often, who we come from. So imagine suddenly discovering the last name you’ve always carried… might not actually be the name you should have. 

Alex Neason began looking into her family’s history after discovering her great grandfather’s name was different from what she believed for her whole life. In her search to discover the story of that last name, she enlisted genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith.

For Black Americans, genealogy can fill in the blanks left by the legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S. Services like the Freedmen’s Bureau and Slave Voyages provide free access to records and documents to help with that search. We talk about the power of genealogy in fostering knowledge and connection for Black Americans.

Source

If you click on the word “source,” it’ll take you to the article where you’ll see a LISTEN button. It’s a 30-minute audio that discusses the info provided in the article even further. Y’all know I’m big on getting people to trace their lineage. All that “we don’t know where we come from.” Who told you that? Everything in the US is in plain sight. Everything.

Discover your fam. 

I assist others when they reach a roadblock, like getting past the “1870 wall.” But you can’t beat the feeling of you discovering them on your own. Unearthing your history, seeing photos, reading stories that were stored, and saying their names that haven’t been said for centuries. I’ve been tracing mine (scanning, logging) since my family reunion in 2005 through oral family history and obituaries (those are records), and since 2011 through databases of US archived records like ancestry.com (purchased by BlackStone) and familysearch.org (free database owned by the Latter-day Saints Church). There are others, but those are the main two I use for comparative results.  

Archiving Centers, Census Records & Other Records

There are archiving centers in every state and DC that also keep records for those particular states and the federal capital. There’s a footnote on all records that tells you where they are housed. And please...Don’t just do a simple pedigree chart of your family tree. Get to know your great-aunts, great-uncles and cousins. It’s also helpful for seeing who lived around who (fam often lived next door to each other) and puts more of the pieces together of your complete family story. You can see the land and acres they owned or your fam today still owns, as well as if that land was stolen from them.

US census records go back to year 1790. Depending on when or if your ancestors were enslaved or free: you’ll find them attached to slave logs that have been made available online or kept in archiving centers (you go there), or or they’ll be listed on census records as free persons (1790-1710), free colored male/female (1820-1840), Black (1850-1920), Mulatto (1850-1890, 1910-1920) or Negro (1900, 1930-1950). “New” census documents are put on sites, like ancestry.com, every 10 years. As of 2023, you can only trace from 1950 to 1790. The 1960 census will be out in 2030. How to trace from 1950 to today, birth, death and residential records. So again, depending on the census year, you’ll notice your ancestors racial classification change throughout documents for obvious reasons. 

Keep in mind that the the largest slave trade for the United States was the domestic slave trade. In house human trafficking and selling (in addition to property insurance of enslaved people and the selling of enslaved people as the building block of Wall Street’s stock exchange) is how US capitalism was built. So just because you know a lot of your people are from Tennessee, for example, it doesn't mean that’s where that line stayed. I’ve found my ancestors throughout 7 states (so far). Another example, people with Louisiana roots damn near always have ancestors who were trafficked from early Virginia. Going beyond year 1790, records were kept in Christian and Catholic churches and old family history books so most of those documents are scanned online and/or still kept in the churches. I’m talking books books. 

If your ancestors walked the Trail of Tears, or were caught as prisoners of war or trafficked to Indian Nations to be enslaved, you’ll find an Oklahoma Indian Territory and Oklahoma Freedmen Rolls section on ancestry.com. You can discover more info on sites, like the Oklahoma Historical Society. (Every state has its own historical society for archived genealogical records.) 

Here’s the National Archives.

Also for Oklahoma, you may also find your ancestors in Indian Census Rolls (1855-1940) as [insert tribe] Freedmen, depending if they weren’t rejected through the “blood quantum” Dawes Rolls for not being the new light to white status. You’ll see their application and the listed questions & answers with or without a big void stamp. And on the census, you’ll even see the letter I (pronounced like eye) changed to the letter B. This is also for those in Louisiana.

Freedmen’s Bureau & Bank Records 

There were Freedmen’s Bureau records and Freedman’s Savings Bank records in other states. To see if your ancestors had their records in those systems, you can search by their name. The state and age will pop up with people having that name. It’ll give you a wealth of other info, like all of the kids and other fam if they were present or mentioned to the person who logged that info in. With the Freedmen Bank records, you can see how much money your ancestors put in there (that was later stolen from them by way of the United States government), which is still there today. It’s the biggest bank heist in US history (that they try to keep hush hush) with the equivalence of more than $80 million in today’s value stored in there today. Back then, it was valued almost close to $4 million. Stolen wealth met with bootstrap lectures. 

Here’s a short video on that heist:

Today the bank is called the Freedman's Bank Building, located right on Pennsylvania Ave. Plain sight. 

Trace your lineage. 

There’s a lot more that I can list. But this is just the basics. Like I said before, it’s a more rewarding feeling when you discover your ancestors by yourself. You may reach roadblocks. Take a break. Try going the “Card Catalog” route on ancestry.com’s search engine. Don’t skip the small details. 

SN: Slave Voyages isn’t a genealogical site, but rather a database for slave ship logs and the estimates of purchased Africans who became human cargo to be enslaved by country like USA, or by colonizers like Spain, Great Britain, etc.

[3rdeyeblaque]

On January 8th-10th, we remember The German Coast Uprising of 1811 ✊🏾 (Updated 2024)

When a Haitian brotha - given the slave name of Charles Deslondes (age 31, described as a Creole mulatto & forced to work as a slave driver/overseer in the fields) - spearheaded what would be the largest slave rebellion & sparked the bloodiest suppression in U.S. History. 

On Jan 8th, 1811 Deslondes & 14 other enslaved men and women went on the attack wounding their slave "master" (& owner of the Andry Plantation in St. John's Parish) & successfully killed his son. While Andry Sr. managed to escape, Deslondes & allies swept the Andry Plantation & fled along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Territory (of the time) crossing into neighboring parishes. As they marched through these parishes - with makeshift weapons, beating war drums, & touting guns -, enslaved men & women from neighboring plantations joined their ranks. As did members from the rather large population of "free" borns in the area. 

By January 10th their numbers swelled to 400-500 rebels. They outnumbered their oppressors 5:1. They successfully killed yet another slave "master", sending Whites from the area fleeing in terror into New Orleans.

Ultimately, the governor of the then Louisiana Territory assembled a militia of volunteers along with 700 U.S. Army Troops & Navy Sailors to put an end to the 3-day long rebellion after receiving intel about Deslondes' next move. The rebels were ultimately betrayed. A few enslaved men & women sold out their rebel brethren by either providing intel or fighting alongside their "masters" were rewarded with their "freedom". 

95 rebels were killed in the process. A tribunal trial on the 13th resulted in the execution by firing squad of 18 more rebels. After which, they were decapitated & their heads were put upon spikes posted along major roadways throughout New Orleans.

As for Deslondes, his hands were chopped off upon his capture; he was shot in both thighs and bullets were riddled throughout his body. Before he passed, his body was shoved into a bundle of straw and he was roasted alive as a warning to other rebels and "free" folks.

The blood of over 500 Ancestors still soaks the soil along the eastern bank of the Mississippi in what is presently St. John & St. Charles/Jefferson Parishes, Louisiana. These are places of power.

Today we pour libations & give 💐 for the Ancestors paid in blood the price of our freedom; especially those of us residing on or near the lands where these battles took place.

Offering suggestions: light a white candle for the healing/elevation of the ancestors lost, prayers of gratitude for their sacrifice,  libations of water/leave flowers, especially along the eastern bank of the Mississippi in what is presently St. John & St. Charles/Jefferson Parishes, Louisiana (if able)

‼️Note: offering suggestions are just that & strictly for veneration purposes only. Never attempt to conjure up any spirit or entity without proper divination/Mediumship counsel.‼️

To be of Hoodoo is, and has always been, to fight back. Over the next 3 days, remember: We been fighting. We been sacrificing. We been spiriting. We been victorious. Reflect on the cost of true freedom that these Ancestors paid in blood so we wouldn't have to.

Let this also be a reminder of the blood that intimately flows between Ayiti & Turtle Island.

Remember Saint Charles Deslondes. Honor him. Reflect on what true freedom looks like & the ongoing fight that it takes to sustain it. 

[myhauntedsalem]

Rotherwood Mansion

Kingsport, Tennessee

The Rotherwood Mansion was built by the Reverend Frederick A. Ross in 1818 and is rumored to be the home of a ghostly Lady in White. Legend says that the lady is Ross’s daughter, Rowena, who was said to be looking for her love who drowned in the Holston River nearby. After several more tragedies, Rowena went to the same river where she drowned herself. Ever since, her spirit has lingered at the mansion.

The funeral of the most hated man in Kingsport, as the pastor began to give Phipps his final words, the river below the gathering began to bubble and churn, as if it were boiling, the currents moving so fast the water itself was muddy. The coffin was vibrating, as though something inside wanted out badly. They heard the scrabbling of what sounded like claws against wood and with a roar, a gigantic black dog blasted out of the casket, bolting out from under the black cloth as the attendants screamed in terror. The dog snarled at them with its gleaming eyes before bolting off across the grounds and vanishing into the woods.

Some say the angry ghost of Joshua Phipps can be seen or heard roaming the halls of Rotherwood and others report hearing a phantom dog barking. Phipps was known in life to be a cruel man and his evil laugh has been heard throughout the mansion. His evil did not stop at the slaves and his treatment of them. Phipps was just as cruel with his own family and had a strange request about his death. He wanted to be buried standing up on the top of the hill at Rotherwood, so he could always be looking down into the bottoms and see the slaves working.

The remaining family began to whisper of things moving in the shadows of the house, of hearing animal feet running through the hallways and most horrifying of all, that the laughter and sound of Joshua Phipps stalking his way around the home as he would appear at night at the foot of the bed and yank the bed clothes off, keeping anyone from sleeping.  The slaves claimed that the ghost of Joshua Phipps had risen from the grave along with a giant black dog to torment them every night. Fed up with such reports, the family to calm their own fears agreed that Phipps’s grave would be dug up to prove once and for all that the man was truly dead. Opening the grave turned out to offer more mysteries and terror than anyone imagined. The coffin was still there and once opened, it was empty.

Not longer after, violence struck Rotherwood again as the slaves were unable to bear the torment from their unseen attackers, they revolted, destroying Phipps’s headstone, desecrating his grave and finally and killing their last torturer, Phipps’s equally cruel mistress, the mulatto woman. They beat her to death and what happened to her body is unknown.

Hell Hounds and the apparitions of not only Joshua Phipps, but also that of Rowena Ross, Pricilla and the spirits of slaves murdered on the grounds are said to wander the property. 

It is also reported that you can hear the moaning, the wailing, the crying of slaves who were tortured or killed on the plantation grounds.

[simplyvladimir]

My ass is absolutely not on fire about "Castlevania: Nocturne".

Well, if you remove the word "Castlevania" from "Castlevania: Nocturne", you'll get a pretty good animated series. It needs to be said that I watched first Castlevania just with common facts of this universe and game experience of Lords of the Shadows. I liked the show (tho it had it's own disadvantages). And I really waited for the continuation of it. Even when I saw the first trailer of Nocturne my expectation were at the veeeeeeery low level. The idea of taking course to the historical events seemed not very good to me, because if to mix them with Castlevania's world it will surely turned into goo-mix of something strange and unlogical. Designs were +\- okayish, despite piano in the bushes - Drolta. Like, wtf is this mix of Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga doing here? By the trailer it was already a fact that happened classic Netflixifiction, but I forced myself to think that it's not that bad. So I watched this new season. Aaaaaand if to be short - it's bleh. Thank you for your attention, have good day, bye. If not to be short - hmmm, where should I start? Promotion said the events will take their place at French Revolution, but we see like 0 things about except few very short scenes and the main idea of the Crew of Fighting Kids. Maybe it will be shown in the future seasons, but not now. The biggest dissapointment to me - characters. Richter Belmont, the most powerful of the all generations of Belmont clan is... weak crybaby. He can do shit. This is all. Annette is absolute OC. She changed her race, story and I bet she could kick both Drolta's and Erzsebet's asses with her left finger, but Netflix decided that it will be too much. Drolta went through bimbofication and now she is a vampire? a demon? a latex inventor? I think that the creators of the show themselves do not fully understand this. Erzsebet now is the egyptian goddess avatar and even older than Dracula. Typical white-skinned egyptian (I swear I almost heard her saying "Eat shit old dick"). You know, these new extra-powerful sequel's characters whom anyone never heard anything about. Olrox, aztec gay vampire. Aka Quetzalcoatl. Powerful bottom. Mizrak, mestizo\mulatto gay Malta knight. He is such a himbo that chainmail fits tight on him and his barber secretly make his job every fucking day. The plot, motivation of the characters, logic - this all were thrown into the toilet. Yep, in one scene we see that vampires kills a lot of people just in one town, people terrified, and in another - how they are partying with humans on the streets. In this season vampires can beat the sun with umbrellas, levitate, turn into half-demons and hell knows anything else, but can't fly away from the wide cage in their bat-shape. Annette don't give a shit about Richter and even get really mad about him, then BOOM. She is suddenly have romantic feelings to him. And he have feelings to her too (but this is lie, we are all know that he likes milfs). This all looks like the situation with Resident evil Netflix tv series, when the absolutely side story used the brand name to get views. It's also very obviously that the budget was terribly cut, because some animations looks like they were at least halfly AI-animated. No offence to the real animators of the show, you did good work, guys. As I said before - it could be a good show if it was just "Nocturne". Thank you for your attention.

[dsantine]

Blessing of Samba

It's better to be happy than to be sad Happiness is the best thing that exists it's like a light in the heart

But to make a samba with beauty it takes quite a bit of sadness it takes quite a bit of sadness but it doesn't make a samba, no!

Otherwise, it's like loving a woman who is just beautiful, so what? A woman has to have something besides beauty Anything sad, anything that cries Anything what feels wistful A bruised love swing A beauty that comes from the sadness of knowing herself a woman Made just to love To suffer for your love And to be just forgiveness

Making samba is not telling a joke and whoever makes samba like that is nothing the good samba is a form of prayer

Because samba is the sadness that sways and sadness always has a hope sadness always has a hope for a day of not being sad anymore no!

Like those people who walk around playing with life Be careful comrade life is for real And make no mistake, there is only one Two even if it's good

No one will tell me they have Without proving very well proven With a certificate issued by a notary in the sky And signed underneath: God And with a recognized signature!

Life is no joke, friend Life is the art of encounter Although there is so much mismatch in life There is always a woman waiting for you With eyes full of affection And hands full of forgiveness Put some love in your life as in your samba

Put a some love on a beat and you'll see that nobody in the world beats the beauty that has a samba, no!

Because samba was born there in Bahia And if today he is white in poetry If today he is white in poetry He's too black at heart

I, for example, the captain of the bush Vinicius de Moraes poet and diplomat The blackest white in Brazil In the direct line of Xangô, Saravá!

The Blessing, Madam The biggest ialorixá in Bahia Land of Caymmi and João Gilberto The Blessing, Pixinguinha You who cried on the flute All my love hurts

The blessing, Sinhô, the blessing, Cartola Blessing, Ismael Silva Your blessing, Heitor dos Prazeres The Blessing, Nelson Cavaquinho The Blessing, Geraldo Pereira The blessing, my good Cyro Monteiro You, Nono's nephew

The Blessing, Noel, Your Blessing, Ary The blessing, all the great Brazilian samba dancers white, black, mulatto Beautiful like the soft skin of Oxum

The blessing, maestro Antonio Carlos Jobim Dear partner and friend That you've traveled so many songs with me And there are still so many to travel The Blessing, Carlinhos Lyra partner one hundred percent

You who unite action with feeling and to the thought The blessing, the blessing, Baden Powell New friend, new partner That you made this samba with me Blessing, friend

The blessing, maestro Moacir Santos You are not one, you are many My Brazil of All Saints Including my São Sebastião Saravá! The blessing, that I'm leaving I will have to say goodbye

Put a some love on a beat and you'll see that nobody in the world beats the beauty that has a samba, no!

Because samba was born there in Bahia And if today he is white in poetry If today he is white in poetry He's too black at heart

[whitegrlonme]

This feel more like a truck, speed but it still run

[mightyaphrodytee]

There were a few times in my life when music changed for me—what I responded to changed slowly over time, but yeah, there were definite infusions of NEW that veered off on paths maybe not so well-trodden, but that nonetheless stood out as touchstones in my ~~~dramatic half-whisper~~~ journey through 🎶MUSIC 🎼

1977: Heard the best of what’s now considered “classic rock” as it existed at the time, when it was just called “Rock” or “Heavy Metal” or “Prog.” Bands like Rush, Boston, Yes, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, that didn’t get a lot of airplay on the Top 40 stations I’d exclusively listened to. It was thrilling. I caught up on ten years of ignorance in like, 9 months. But I kinda missed out on punk because of that immersion, thanks to my new besties.

1982: Heard my first indie/alternative (“new wave” to some) music and fell hard. The Cure, The English Beat, Joy Division, Kim Wilde, Elvis Costello, U2, Talking Heads, etc. when we moved to Colorado. The availability of some truly esoteric indie music via the Boulder station KBCO was legendary. We had three or four stations in addition to that one! Spoiled! The eighties, man. R.E.M.!!! The music in the clubs was what was on the radio was what was on MTV—you couldn’t escape it, so this huge subset of the rock-listening population were all listening to the big hits at the same time. Madonna, Dire Straits, The Eurythmics, Prince, Duran Duran, Pretenders, Bon Jovi. EVERYBODY knew the hits of the eighties.

1991: Heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the car radio driving through Austin, and both my companion and I were immediately silenced by that intro, and by the end, we were like “What just happened?” just in total delight/light shock…did he really just scream about a mulatto? Who talks like that in 1991, sir? But we just immediately knew this was gonna be huge, and it was, and then came grunge and grunge-lite for the rest of the decade. Soundgarden, STP, Bush, Incubus, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Nirvana (for such a goddamned short time, it’s insane to look back and realize we had so few years with him!)

For some people, life is unbearable without having their consciousness altered in some way. Drugs being one of those ways.

2003: Heard “Caring Is Creepy” by The Shins on a 4-hour “New Alternative” loop XM Radio had handed out as a free trial. Those songs on that loop woke me up to the possibility of new sounds that hit that same place in me as the best of the 80’s and 90’s. I remember Doves “Pounding”, which was used in an episode of The Consultant on Amazon Prime just this week (I shrieked!), “Silver Spoon” by Bis, “Shapes” by The Long Winters, The Postal Service, Death Cab For Cutie…wish I could remember them all. Bruce Springsteen’s Magic album had a song that was my most played for a few years in the aughts—“Radio Nowhere”, which I first heard on that XM trial loop and loved so much I bought the whole album. On iTunes. Still have it. Saw Garden State, heard “Caring Is Creepy” on the soundtrack (again—i shrieked!), and “New Slang,” and fell for them even harder.

Now I listen to what I used to hate (classic rock), but my fairly narrow preference window means I don’t SAY I listen to classic rock, because except for YouTube, I only listen to Radiohead, some Tool, some Metallica most days.

My life is now just mainly Radiohead with a few dollops of all the songs I’ve loved before, from every decade that rock and roll has been rock and roll with ALL its subgenres, heavy on Tool and Metallica as of late.

I can’t even tell what popular music today even is. It all sounds like video game background to me.

Will you still need me

Will you still feed me

When I’m 64?

[runningracingdancingchasing]

dry martini and tom collins!

Cocktail Quiz - Accepting!

[ dry martini ]  what is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to them?

(Hopping into XS verse for this one.) Rapunzel is kind of hard to embarrass because a lot of the time she doesn't know that society would expect her to be embarrassed. However, after she's been at the temple for a few months, she called Rai "mulatto," because she heard him call himself that. Clay turned beat red and told her she could not say that word. And then she had to have a conversation about racism. She's never been so mortified in her entire life.

[ tom collins ]  which living person would they most want to meet?

Living person? Oh, that's tough, partly because she's not really tuned into pop culture. There's lots of dead people she'd love to meet...

I don't think it would necessarily be anyone particularly influential. She'd want a lengthy conversation with a curator at the Smithsonian, or sit down with the Irwin family and talk animals and conservation, or shake Stuart Semple's hand for liberating art.

[ausetkmt]

Tejumola Butler Adenuga

“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide. One can see in the slave schedules of the 1850 and 1860 censuses the many entries marked “mulatto,” individuals the census taker regarded as mixed race, rather than Black.

This was the literal family produced by the slave system before the Civil War—children conceived from the sexual dominance of free white men over enslaved Black women in liaisons that ranged from a single encounter of rape to extended relationships, such as the decades-long connection between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

Few of these ties were ever acknowledged; white fathers held their own children in bondage, in most cases treating them little differently from their other human possessions. Of the many excruciating and all-but-unfathomable dimensions of American slavery, its manifold assaults on kinship seem among the most inhumane. What was the nature of “slavery in the family,” a designation that today seems both twisted and oxymoronic? How did individuals and families survive its emotional distortions and its insertion of racial subjugation into the most intimate—and precious—aspects of life?

The Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, born on a South Carolina plantation, once famously remarked of this widespread denial:

The Grimkes of South Carolina were in no sense representative of the South’s slaveholding class. The decision of Sarah and Angelina, two daughters of the wealthy planter John Grimke and his wife, Mary, to confront the horror of slavery and move north in the 1820s to become abolitionists and feminists illustrates in its singularity the difficulties of escaping the grip of a system that compromised every white person connected to it.

Two of their mixed-race nephews, Archibald and Francis, sons of their brother Henry and the enslaved Nancy Weston, emerged as major figures in Black political and social life after the Civil War. They were embraced and supported by their activist aunts, who had not known of their existence during their early years of bondage, which included brutal beatings and abuse from their white half brother, another of Sarah and Angelina’s nephews. But the exceptional nature of the story—and of the individuals within it—casts into dramatic relief how the slave system could mold lives across generations.

John Grimke, the patriarch, sired 14 white children and held more than 300 enslaved workers on his extensive properties in the South Carolina Low Country and in Charleston. Sarah, his sixth child, born in 1792, displayed remarkable intellectual gifts from an early age, but such talents were not welcomed in a girl. While her father permitted her to teach herself using the books in his library, he denied her the education provided to her brothers.

Sarah described taking a “malicious satisfaction” in defying both her parents and South Carolina law by teaching her “little waiting maid” and numbers of other enslaved workers to read and write. When Sarah’s mother gave birth to her last child, in 1805, Sarah insisted on being named the baby’s godmother. Angelina would be her surrogate daughter.

From the April 2016 issue: The truth about abolition

Thirteen years apart, the two sisters came to share an abhorrence of the slave system on which their family’s wealth and position depended. Angelina was particularly repelled by the institution’s violence—the sound of painful cries from men, women, and even children being whipped; the lingering scars evident on the bodies of those who served her every day; the tales of the dread Charleston workhouse that, for a fee, would administer beatings and various forms of torture out of sight of one’s own household.

Both Sarah and Angelina became deeply religious, rejecting the self-satisfied pieties of their inherited Episcopalian faith, but finding in Christian doctrine a foundation for their growing certainty about the “moral degradation” of southern society. In 1821, Sarah moved to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends; by the end of the decade, Angelina had joined her.

Philadelphia was a focal point of the growing antislavery movement, and the sisters were swept up in the ferment. Soon defying Quaker moderation on slavery just as they had defied their southern heritage, the Grimke sisters embraced William Lloyd Garrison and what was seen as the radicalism of abolition. In essays appearing in 1837 and 1838, Angelina and Sarah each set out the case for the liberation of women and enslaved people.

They joined the Garrisonian lecture circuit, and Angelina developed a reputation as a sterling orator at a time when women were all but prohibited from the public stage. In 1838, Angelina married the abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld in a racially integrated celebration that adhered to the free-produce movement, including no clothing or refreshments produced by enslaved labor. Weld and the sisters shared a household for most of the rest of their lives, and Sarah became a devoted caretaker of Angelina and Theodore’s three children.

Their opposition not just to slavery but to racial inequality and segregation, as well as their support for women’s rights, placed them in the vanguard of reform and at odds with many other white abolitionists. With emancipation, they took up the cause of the freedpeople, which they pursued until they died, Sarah in 1873, Angelina in 1879.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the sisters’ understanding of their family changed. Angelina came across a notice in an 1868 issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard referring to a meeting at Lincoln University where a Black student named Grimke had delivered an admirable address.

She wrote to the young man to ask if he might be the former slave of one of her brothers. Archibald replied that he was in fact her brother’s son, offered details of his early life, and told her about his siblings, Francis, known as Frank, and John. Angelina responded that she was not surprised but found his letter “deeply … touching.” She could not change the past, she observed, but “our work is in the present.” She was glad they had taken the name of Grimke; she hoped they might redeem the family’s honor. “Grimke,” she wrote,

Thus began a relationship in which the Weld-Grimkes provided financial assistance to Archibald at Harvard Law School and Francis at Princeton Theological Seminary and delivered unrelenting exhortations to prove their excellence and worth, both as Grimkes and as representatives of their race. John, seen by his aunts as less talented and less deserving than his brothers, became estranged from his family.

Francis and Archibald achieved notable success—Archibald as a founder and vice president of the NAACP and later the American consul to Santo Domingo, Frank as a prominent member of the clergy and the Black elite of Washington, D.C. Relationships among the white and Black Grimke families were not always easy; Frank in particular found his white relatives oppressively demanding and “unaccustomed to the ways of colored people,” and after a time he declined to accept their support. But it seems telling that Frank nevertheless called his only child Theodora, and Archibald chose to name his daughter Angelina.

The remarkable story of the Grimkes was long neglected by historians, and the way it has come to be told reveals a great deal about how we have chosen to understand the past. Until the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s prompted scholars to look anew at the narrative of Black freedom, abolitionists were regarded as dangerous radicals, to be deplored rather than acclaimed.

The likes of Weld and Garrison, not to mention the women who moved outside their assigned sphere to join them in opposition to slavery, were cast as reckless fanatics, endangering the peace of the nation. But amid appreciation for mid-20th-century activists, perspectives shifted on those who had come before.

Abolitionists turned from demons into heroes, and their lives and struggles aroused widespread and sympathetic scholarly inquiry. Similarly, Black-freedom and women’s-liberation movements spawned new fields of Black and women’s history, making the Grimke sisters and their nephews a focus of exploration.

The fate of the first modern scholarly treatment of the Grimkes is illuminating. Gerda Lerner, who was a founder of the National Organization for Women and became a superstar in the nascent field of women’s history, wrote her Columbia doctoral dissertation on the Grimke sisters.

She published the study as a book in 1967, a moment when the civil-rights movement was well under way but the women’s movement was just emerging. She titled it The Grimké Sisters From South Carolina, with the subtitle, at her publisher’s insistence, Rebels Against Slavery instead of her preferred Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. “ ‘Women’s rights,’ ” her editor told her, “was not a concept that would sell books.”

By 1971, when a paperback edition appeared, the growth of feminism permitted the subtitle she had originally intended, along with a blurb from Gloria Steinem hailing the sisters as “pioneers of Women’s Liberation.”

Drawing on a flush of historical work that included scholarly biographies of the two nephews, Mark Perry in 2001 published a study that considered Black and white Grimkes together. His book explored the lives of “four extraordinary individuals”—Archibald and Frank as well as the sisters. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family’s Journey From Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders was unabashedly celebratory—designed to inspire a general audience by underscoring the possibility for racial enlightenment and for connections across the color line. “We see in their troubles our own,” he wrote of the family; “in their triumphs our hope; and in their history, the history of our nation.”

The Grimkes proved fodder for drama and fiction as well. In 2014, the novelist Sue Monk Kidd released The Invention of Wings, a tale that imagined the intertwined lives of Sarah Grimke and an enslaved girl presented to her on her 11th birthday. Oprah designated it a Book Club selection, declaring that it “heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman—slave or free,” and it debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The Grimkes’ story has served as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. We have projected onto it questions that have troubled us about ourselves and our racial past and found in it the promise of transcending the forces that seem to trap humans in the circumstances of their era.

We have, as Perry wrote, seen in it our own anxieties, hopes, and history: The sisters have represented the possibility of moral redemption and social transformation; their nephews have embodied the myth and reality of personal uplift as well as social conscience and commitment. All four defied the expectations and limitations of their origins. For more than half a century, as the rights of Black people and women have advanced, we have rediscovered and then lionized the Grimkes.

The latest addition to the Grimke literature marks a new departure. Greenidge’s The Grimkes is not a story about heroes. Instead, it is intended as an exploration of trauma and tragedy. Like the studies of the Grimkes that have preceded it, the book reflects the challenges of our own time, but Greenidge, who is an assistant professor at Tufts, regards these not with optimism about possibilities for racial progress but with something closer to despair.

She set out, she declares in her introduction, to write “a family biography that resonates in the lives of those who struggle with the personal and political consequences of raising children and families in the aftermath of the twenty-first-century betrayal of the radical human rights promise of the 1960s.”

Although earlier treatments hailed the sisters’ successes, Greenidge finds these vitiated by Sarah and Angelina’s unacknowledged “complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against.”

Sarah’s “dissatisfaction was possible only because of the very privileges denied to the numerous Black people who cultivated her family’s cotton and maintained their household.” The “feel-good stories” of Archibald’s and Francis’s achievements have ignored “the superficialities of the colored elite” of which they became proud members, and have failed to call the nephews to account for their obsessions with skin color and class hierarchies in the Black community.

As the pastor of Washington’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Frank served a Black “professional, political, and business elite” that “shielded their congregation from the Black masses” by means of a rigorous admission process. Reverend Grimke “cultivated a conservative culture of racial respectability” that resulted, Greenidge finds, in the purge of ���less well-heeled (and darker-skinned) members from Fifteenth Street’s rolls.” Archibald was unable to transcend his experience as a “fetishized Black wunderkind” during years spent in “neo-abolitionist New England”—at Harvard and as a young lawyer in Boston.

His service as the consul to Santo Domingo, often cited as a badge of remarkable accomplishment for one born in slavery, came “at the expense of the African-descended subjects living under American empire.” Greenidge mentions only briefly Archibald’s role in leading the NAACP’s Washington efforts to combat President Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government. But she notes disapprovingly that despite “his genuine belief in racial equality,” he “neither argued for racial revolution nor criticized the color consciousness, materialism, and social conservatism of his fellow colored elite.” Even as Archibald witnessed the steady escalation of Jim Crow, she contends, he remained too close to white society and white power to effectively resist it.

Greenidge is the author of an earlier, prizewinning study of another leader of the postbellum Black community, William Monroe Trotter, who had an often close but fraught relationship with Archibald Grimke. The two ultimately broke sharply over Trotter’s more radical, less accommodationist stance, disseminated through his paper, the Boston Guardian. Trotter, Greenidge writes, “provided a voice for thousands of disenchanted, politically marginalized black working people” for whom Grimke’s efforts in the “politically moderate camp of colored elite” had little significance. In Greenidge’s portrayal of this conflict, and in her broader interpretation, her allegiances seem clear.

Greenidge leaves the stature of Sarah, Angelina, Archie, and Frank diminished, but she offers an enriched view of the extended Black Grimke family. Foregrounding the nephews’ enslaved mother with a chapter of her own, she provides a valuable treatment of the free Black Forten family—the prosperous Philadelphia clan to which Frank’s wife, Charlotte, belonged—and highlights the crucial role of Black women in the abolitionist struggle.

A third-generation antislavery activist, Charlotte served as a teacher of the freedpeople in the Sea Islands, and her two 1864 articles on her experiences there made her the first Black writer to be published in The Atlantic.

From the May 1864 issue: Charlotte Forten Grimké’s “Life on the Sea Islands”

The Grimkes begins and ends with a portrait of Angelina Weld-Grimke, the only child of Archibald and his white wife and an often-overlooked figure in the Grimke lineage. Here she serves as an embodiment of the troubled legacy Greenidge seeks to portray.

Abandoned by her mother when she was 7, Angelina, who lived until 1958, became a writer, struggling as a mixed-race woman, a Grimke, and a lesbian to confront the realities and tragedies of race in her own and the nation’s heritage. Her best-known work is a play titled Rachel, centered on a brutal lynching that leads the victim’s daughter to decide she will never bring children into such a cruelly racist world.

Rachel became a “vehicle for civil rights activism,” but Greenidge emphasizes that the play also “reveals an artist who was as concerned with intergenerational trauma as she was with political protest.” Angelina’s life and work, Greenidge argues, gave expression to the failures—and the “existential rage”—of a Black elite whose narrative of “Black Excellence and racial exceptionalism” had rendered them politically “impotent” and “irrelevant” in the face of the violence of lynching and the imposition of Jim Crow.

At a time when we are confronted once again by an assault on rights long presumed to have been obtained and guaranteed—including voting and affirmative action—Greenidge has found in the Grimkes’ experiences a world chillingly like our own. Just as the promise of emancipation and Radical Reconstruction evaporated into Jim Crow, so we live, she writes, in an era when the heralded accomplishments of the civil-rights movement are being overturned and its promise abandoned. Upbeat stories of Black achievements cannot, she insists, counterbalance the wider reality of enduring oppression and inequality.

In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars of history and literature to the question of slavery’s “afterlife,” to the assessment of its impact long after its legal demise. Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots.

She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped. Our nation’s racial trauma lives on. The arc of history bends slowly—or perhaps, Greenidge seems to suggest, hardly at all.

[m4ngomarmalade]

ok. next step of beating the tragic mulatto complex away with a stick is going to the blk student union at my school that i have wanted to go to for all of high school but have been too scared

[skendong]

Popcorn Brain Poetry

Will you forgive me? I’ve got popcorn brain. I saw your vital message but was distracted again.

Scrolling fart pranks in New York’s Central Park, Blasting flatulence seems to make people laugh.

Then a notification pinged: Kendrick beefing Drake. Would you be angry if I said, pipe down, pipsqueak?

Insulting Black Messiah courting mulatto queen, But “Not Like Us” shot up by 70 million streams.

Think Drizzy has a drinking & gambling addiction? A minor psychopath always playing the victim?

Then an ad popped up about Diddy’s affliction, So, I clicked. Bad boy deleted all his Instagram.

Even the apology video for beating up Cassie, Mounting legal issues increasing his anxiety.

I apologize for not responding immediately. I’m struggling to caress a coherent train of thought.

I was about to reply, but an algorithm trapped me, Another ping & it was wholly my decision

To click a notification you may hold in derision: A headline-grabbing piece on Taylor Swift’s life!

Billions generated from the Eras Tour. Opera singer grandmother, dad a stockbroker…

Knowledge on every corner demanding attention, Craving, clicking senseless data, dopamine-driven.

They say popcorn brain is like a crack addict, Piping a cyclical habit difficult to break.

The self assesment test claimed 7 hours a day, I touch my screen & scroll in endless play.

Short bursts of data to satisfy my stimuli, even Hideous wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar &

A propensity to switch when grief fills my heart – Gaza to prank farts in New York’s Central Park.

So, don’t be mad at me, I’ve got popcorn brain. I’ll respond straight away the next time around.

I’m going to call you now, but one more thing, I don’t know why I clicked; check this news I bring.

In your inbox, an article on your favorite poet, They busted him downtown, didn’t even know it.

With three blonde escorts, marijuana, & cocaine, Prancing out of his mind in a bra & G-string.

https://skendongpoetry.com/archives/13194

[legendoro]

It's the ol' racist homicidal double standard. Very well capture in this Brazilian song.

Haiti

by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (1993)

Quando você for convidado // When you’re invited

Pra subir no adro da Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado // To go up to the gallery of the Jorge Amado House Foundation

Pra ver do alto a fila de soldados, quase todos pretos// To watch from up there the line of soldiers, almost all Black

Dando porrada na nuca de malandros pretos // Beating Black malandros on the back of the neck

De ladrões mulatos // [Beating] mulatto thieves

E outros quase brancos // And other near-Whites

Tratados como pretos// Treated as Blacks

Só pra mostrar aos outros quase pretos// Just to show the other almost Blacks

E são quase todos pretos// And they’re almost all Black

Como é que pretos, pobres e mulatos// How Blacks, the poor, and mulattos

E quase brancos, quase pretos de tão pobres são tratados// And nearly Whites — but so poor they’re almost Black — are treated

E não importa se olhos do mundo inteiro possam // And it doesn’t matter if the eyes of the whole world might

Estar por um momento voltados para o largo // Turn briefly on the Largo [square]

Onde os escravos eram castigados // Where the slaves were beaten [Salvador’s Pelourinho]

E hoje um batuque, um batuque // And today, a batuque, a batuque [drumming circle]

Com a pureza de meninos uniformizados // With the wholesomeness of boys in high-school uniforms

De escola secundária em dia de parada // On parade day

E a grandeza épica de um povo em formação // And the epic greatness of a people in formation

Nos atrai, nos deslumbra e estimula // Attracts us, enchants and animates us

Não importa nada // Nothing makes a difference

Nem o traço do sobrado, nem a lente do Fantástico // Not the vestige of the mansion, not the lens of Fantástico [popular Sunday night TV news and entertainment show]

Nem o disco de Paul Simon // Not the Paul Simon album

Ninguém // Nobody

Ninguém é cidadão // No one is a citizen

Se você for ver a festa do Pelô’ //If you go to see the party in the Pelô [Pelourinho]

E se você não for // And if you don’t go

Pense no Haiti // Think about Haiti

Reze pelo Haiti// Pray for Haiti

O Haiti é aqui // Haiti is here

O Haiti não é aqui// Haiti is not here

E na TV se você vir um deputado em pânico // And on TV if you see a congressman in panic

Mal dissimulado // Poorly veiled

Diante de qualquer, mas qualquer mesmo // Before any, but really any

Qualquer, qualquer // Any, any

Plano de educação // Education plan

Que pareça fácil // That might seem easy

Que pareça fácil e rápido // That might seem easy and fast

E vá representar uma ameaça de democratização // And may represent a threat of democratization

Do ensino de primeiro grau // Of elementary instruction

E se esse mesmo deputado defender a adoção da pena capital // And if that same congressman defends the adoption of the death penalty

E o venerável cardeal disser que vê tanto espírito no feto // And the venerable cardinal says he finds so much spirit in the fetus

E nenhum no marginal // And none in the marginal [blanket designation for poor criminal]

E se, ao furar o sinal, o velho sinal vermelho habitual // And if, upon running the light, the standard red light

Notar um homem mijando na esquina da rua // You see a man pissing on the street corner

Sobre um saco brilhante de lixo do Leblon// On a shiny bag of garbage from Leblon

E ao ouvir o silêncio sorridente de São Paulo diante da chacina // And upon hearing the grinning silence of São Paulo before the massacre

Cento e onze presos indefesos // One hundred and eleven defenseless prisoners

Mas presos são quase todos pretos // But prisoners are almost all Black

Ou quase pretos // Or almost Black

Ou quase brancos, quase pretos de tão pobres // Or nearly White, but so poor they’re almost Black

Pense no Haiti // Think about Haiti

Reze pelo Haiti // Pray for Haiti

O Haiti é aqui // Haiti is here

O Haiti não é aqui // Haiti is not here

E pobres são como podres // And the poor are considered rotten

E todos sabem como se tratam os pretos // And everyone knows how Blacks are treated

E quando você for dar uma volta no Caribe // And when you go take a trip around the Caribbean

E quando for trepar sem camisinha // And when you have sex without a condom

E apresentar sua participação inteligente no bloqueio a Cuba // And present your intelligent participation in the embargo of Cuba

🍉Data sources under the cut🍉

[commedesgarconsblack]

[lone5tar]

🖤❣️