Essays 2001-2015

FIRST, Congratulations to Honorable Ambassador Fidelia Graand-Galon of the Republic of Suriname who, speaking for her country’s “Maroon Women’s Network,” invited my dear friend Phil Pompey Fixico, President of the U.S. Semiroon Historical Society to an important international maroon conference in Suriname. Attending as an honored guest for his many activist networks and international reputation, […]

Thanksgiving remains the most treasured holiday in the United States, honored by Presidents since Abraham Lincoln initiated the Holiday to rouse patriotism in a war that was not going well. Thanksgiving has often served political ends. In 2003, in the current age of US Middle East invasions, President George Bush flew to Bagdad, Iraq to […]

Congratulations to the hundreds of delegates and to organizer Jay Winter Nightwolf for assembling the First National Congress of Black Native American Indians. From the sun-splashed islands of the Caribbean to Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, the marshlands of Florida and towering mountains from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, your heroic ancestors wrote a proud history […]

This year, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 85-years-old. Since he embraced peace, practiced nonviolent resistance, and sought a loving society, for years the media has cast him as a sincere, avuncular, dreamy leader. This hardly comports with his essence or his fiercely tenacious battles—against war, racism and poverty—found in his writings, speeches, marches, […]

Only months after San Francisco’s horse-powered streetcar companies during the Civil War dispatched their streetcars—with orders to only accept white passengers—African American citizens began to directly challenge this discrimination. On April 17, 1863 Charlotte Brown, a young African American woman from a prominent family, boarded a streetcar and was forced off. Determined to assert her […]

Thanksgiving Day remains the most treasured holiday in the United States. Work comes to a halt, families gather, eat turkey, and count their blessings. A presidential proclamation blesses the day. But we must not forget that it preeminently serves political ends. Remember in 2003 when President George Bush flew into Baghdad on Thanksgiving Day to […]

Gil Noble was a well-informed, charming, confident broadcaster devoted to seeing real news reached his community – all of New York. Operating within a network and system [ABC-TV] that treated news as entertainment and, often as political containment, he stood as an intrepid, challenging force. From 1969 on when his “Like It Is” interviewed me […]

This February 2nd stands as the 500th anniversary of the death of Hatuey, an Indigenous American fighter for independence from colonialism not mentioned in the same breath as Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. However, Hatuey deserves recognition as their earliest ideological ancestor and great forerunner. Little is known about Hatuey, a Taino Cacique […]

“It’s not that I’m a good debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people,” announced the victorious Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Republican voters [only 2% were African Americans] saw his tough, angry, racial language as straight talking. He eagerly strummed racial themes—Black urban pupils serve as assistant janitors to learn […]