Like everybody else Black I grew up learning about the amazing accomplishments of Marian Anderson and how the Daughters of the American Republic refused to allow her to sing at Washington DC’s famous Constitution Hall, as well as her triumphant performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We can probably assume historians are correct and the decision was made due to racism. But I’d be curious to know if that decision was made before or after the release of this album, “Snoopycat: The Adventures of Marian Anderson’s Cat, Snoopy.”

I thought this was a PhotoShop joke when someone sent me tthe album cover, but it’s for real. You can listen to some of it at the Smithsonian Folkways link above. To be completely fair, it’s catalogued under Music for Children and no sillier (in theory) than Frank Sinatra singing “High Hopes” but the image is just odd given what we’ve been taught of her history.

Needless to say, if you’ve got this ticked somewhere in your vinyl collection, you might want to hold on to it.

The Guardian of London ran a fascinating article on the incomparable lasting power of Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon. Since Castro’s step down, “Papa” Bongo now has the distinction of being the longest serving head of state that was not born into his position. Few people talk about visiting Gabon and its capitol city Libreville, but it’s an interesting place to see. The incredible cache of oil that the country enjoys has made Bongo somewhat like the Jed Clampett of Africa. Unlike the Clampetts, however, Bongo knows exactly how much he stands to gain from the nation’s riches and has deftly engineered a governmental system that enriches those around him and all but eliminates anyone not closely connected with the Bongo family or their close compatriots. But because he hasn’t done it violently, he’s only now getting the attention he deserves in the environment of an Africa on the upswing.

Kinda sounds like the last few years of the Bush Administration, doesn’t it?

Breadfruit” is one of those words I let blow by me for most of my life, reading it in books about exploration, Columbus and slavery and having some sense of its importance as a cash crop at one point in history. But I must admit that other than thinking it was a funny name for a fruit I never got any deeper into knowing much about it. Coming from a family that always admonished me never to let words be spoken or read in my presence that I did not know, that’s inexcusable.

So I’m browsing one of my favorite blogs on African business, Timbuktu Chronicles, and read a post about breadfruit being an underutilized crop, particularly given its nutritional power and potential flexibility for other uses. Which all pointed to a Wikipedia definition of why it’s called breadfruit.

Apparently the fruit is boiled or baked until tender before eating and tastes similar to a potato, but it’s smell when cooked gives off the scent of freshly baked bread. Hence, breadfruit. Duh.

Am I the only idiot who didn’t know this?

And by the way, breadfruit is not those big green balls that you find falling off the trees in your local park, even though it looks like it. Don’t you even think about eating that.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson stopped in our office the other day to talk about a number of things but one thing he mentioned stood out. A month ago we commemorated the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and there was some attention, though not a lot, paid to the reason why King was at the Lorraine Motel. Which, as most people know, was to march in solidarity with striking Memphis garbarge workers, famously known for the  dramatic I AM A MAN signs they held during the strike action.  That was in 1968.  You knew that.

What I did not know - and I’m sure many people did not - is that 15 of those striking sanitation workers are still working on the trucks for the Memphis Sanitation Department 40 years later.

I guess it’s not entirely surprising. If anything it puts into shocking perspective the notion that the civil rights era and its struggles happened a relatively few years ago. Commemorating a death in some ways puts a psychological end to that area - civil rights vs. post civil rights/King vs. post-King.  But that these men are still in Memphis and still working the trucks is information that stands and an unbroken continuum from then to now. For some reason, that kind of blew me away. But maybe I’m overreacting.

Jackson says mainly the men are there because pensions and some of the other things that were striking for in the first place never really got settled in a way that was meaningful.

At the Rainbow PUSH Convention in late June, Jackson and the organization will be honoring the Memphis sanitation employees at a special ceremony.

Late again on this announcement by about a week. Guess I gotta start reading my mail on BisonRoundup.com.

Anyhow, the photos is of Sidney Ribeau, PhD, the new and 16th president of my alma mater Howard University. Had to do a little due diligence to get some info on Dr. Ribeau, and the word is all good. He comes to Howard from the presidency of Bowling Green State University. And I’ll get corrected if I’m wrong about this, but I think he’s the first modern Howard prez not to be a graduate of the school.

Which is not a bad thing at all because one of the first things that needs to happen at the school I love is the”culture of Howard” all too often perpetuated by grads with way too much nostalgia for shit that needs to change. Tops on that “need to change” list is Great and Powerful Wizard-style presidency Howard (and frankly, most HBCUs) has been known for.

Used to be a time when parents sent their kids to a Black college precisely because of that outsized level of paternalism toward the students. People wanted to feel their kids were safe and getting the best education, and the way to that was sending them to a school where professors and administrators acted much more like your Aunt Helen and Uncle Junebug who could spank you if they felt like it, as opposed to people you felt a personal connection with and who could serve as friends and mentors later in life.

That’s all well and good, but particularly at the president’s level that’s always meant you could wave at the president when he walked across the campus, but he’d never know your name unless the gym was named after your Daddy.

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Somewhere lost in the madness that was the Indiana primary, it got lost that Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was in the states two days before the primary to receive an honorary doctorate from Indiana University. Just a small but apologetically late reminder that there are other things going on in the world.

No telling yet whether these folks will make it as far as an interview with Matt Lauer, but apparently inspired by our call a few months ago to take back our culture, Black folk are starting flood YouTube with their own, uh, “culturally relevant” wedding dances. Is there a “Save the FoxTrot” organization out there that can stop all this?

Thanks to William Jelani Cobb for putting this thing on my Facebook page. Gee thanks, dude.

Just in case you lose sight of how important Barack Obama is to our image around the world, a bit of perspective circa 1973:

From a release that came over my transom:

PARAGUAY: AYOREO INDIAN DIES AFTER FIRST CONTACT

A Paraguayan Indian, who lived without contact with the outside world until 1998, has died of tuberculosis. Survival International has called his life, ‘a symbol of the fate of indigenous people in the Americas since Columbus’.

Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indian Parojnai’s life changed forever when in 1998 the destruction of the Chaco forest forced him, his wife and their children to make their first contact with the outside world. For many years they had lived on the run, hiding from the bulldozers which were clearing the forest.

Parojnai told Survival campaigner Jonathan Mazower, ‘We ran from one place to another. It looked like the bulldozer was following us. I had to leave my tools, my bow, my rope to run faster… We thought that the bulldozer had seen our garden and came to eat the fruit – and to eat us too.’

Parojnai and his family finally made contact with the driver of a bulldozer. They approached his home, hugged him and told him in their own language, ‘Don’t be afraid of us, we are good people.’ The man was terrified, but gave them food and water, and gave Parojnai’s wife his football shirt.

Mazower, who visited Parojnai and his family in 2003 and in 2007, said today, ‘When I first met Parojnai, he was already very sick. But I’ve seen pictures of him taken on the day after first contact and he was incredibly fit and healthy then.

‘For me, Parojnai’s life symbolises the fate of indigenous people in the Americas since Columbus. Loss of his land to outsiders forced him to give up his independence, and contact left him sick with a disease that eventually killed him. The same tragedies faced by Indians 500 years ago are being played out today for the world’s last remaining uncontacted tribes.’

Parojnai did not know his age, but is thought to have been about fifty years old.

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