💥 Beautiful Soul! “When you are in alignment with the desires of your heart, things have a way of working out.” Iyanla Vanzant

Concentrate on You!

Have you considered yoga for overall mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical healing and wellbeing? Trust, this eastern practice does not have to be strenuous. You can approach it at different tiers. For example, chair yoga is a thing; it’s good for any level, even newbies! Yoga is also good for dealing with trauma.

One scholar has delved into the long history of Black women finding inner peace with yoga. Civil rights legend Rosa Parks practiced yoga. Black man, yoga is for you, too!

Black History Month

Drums have always been significant healing instruments in African culture, dating back to antiquity. During North American slavery, drums were outlawed because Black people seeking freedom, ingeniously, communicated powerful messages amongst each other by drumming.

History in the Spotlight: The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina

Since South Carolina political culture is in the news, thanks to the Republican primary taking place there on February 24, the Stono Rebellion of Sunday, September 9, 1739 comes to mind. It was the largest uprising by enslaved people in colonial America, and it began near the Stono River in Charleston County.

This, and many other rebellions, contradicts the pernicious myth of “the happy slave” which was perpetuated by white “scholars.” Enslaved Black people were always devising modes of resistance and engaging in ways to access freedom. Of course, uprisings were expected because slavery was brutal, and every healthy human being wants to be free. So, earlier that year, in August, 1739, the “Security Act” had been enacted which required white men to carry guns to Sunday church services. Also, Black people numbered in the majority by 1708 in South Carolina, so, despite the savage behaviors of the enslavers, Blacks would risk everything to be free.

Now, when the permanent British settlements arrived in North America, Spain was already a colonizing force. (Upon the failure of an earlier Spanish colony, some Africans had dispersed into the Native American population.) But by the time of the Stono Rebellion, Spain had been engaged in protracted hostilities with Britain (another reason for the Security Act) over control of the southeast region. English colonies had begun to thrive as a result of the importation and enslavement of Africans from West Africa and through Barbados and the West Indies. These mistreated enslaved people laid the infrastructure, planted and harvested crops, and generated enormous profits for the British settlers. Seeking to disrupt the English colonies, Spain promulgated an offer of freedom to Black people; so, by the time of the Stono Rebellion, many Blacks had already escaped to (Spanish) Florida, where they could also own land.

A brilliant enslaved man, Cato (Jemmy), believed to be of Kongolese (Angolan) descent, recruited other enslaved people and, as they demanded liberty, they sought to reach Florida. The rebellion was defeated and, in the aftermath of the uprising, South Carolina enacted the 1740 Negro Act which helped to “codify White Supremacy.” This repressive Act forbade Black people from learning to read, assembling together, and growing their own food, among other things. In other words, the enslavers sought to severely undermine Black people’s ability to devise methods to escape their brutal treatment. Learning to read, in particular, has always been a threat to White supremacy.

🔶 “For centuries Western intellectuals denied or minimized the contributions of people of African descent to the arts as well as history, even as their artistry in many genres was mimicked and/or stolen. However, we can still see the unbroken chain of Black art production from antiquity to the present, from Egypt across Africa, from Europe to the New World.” 🔶 Read the rest of this statement about the theme of Black History Month, 2024 from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALS).

HAVE A HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

Culture

Cinema

💨Professor emerita Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has been a gift to the nation for more than 50 years. Finally, there is a documentary, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, about this dynamic poet, author, and academic who blasted on the scene during the 1960s Black Arts movement and became an influential cultural force. The trailer is out of this world and the filmmakers are dope, too.

Art

🌺 Tracy Chapman put on a master class performance at the Grammys last Sunday. In the process, her beautiful spirit, artistry, and magnetism connected to a worldwide audience and highlighted the healing power of music and storytelling. It was deeply moving.

Food

🍽️ “Black history in your kitchen” 🍇

Books

📖 Medgar Evers is a genuine SHE Newsletter freedom-fighting hero! He courageously waged battle with the racist southern power structure in an effort to make this a more just country! It’s an honor to spotlight the new book, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America, by author, journalist, and TV host, Joy-Ann Reid. Sadly, Medgar was the first big name human rights leader to be assassinated during the horrific “turbulent ‘60s” decade. He was murdered on June 12, 1963—before Malcolm, Martin, and Fred Hampton. (That same year in November, President John F. Kennedy would be murdered, too.) Medgar toiled brilliantly and courageously in the City of Jackson, in the beautiful state of Mississippi, where stifling racism and sick virulent white supremacist ideology was so pervasive you could practically breathe it.

The state is the birthplace of so many extraordinary Black human beings, and when asked why he didn’t leave and migrate North, Medgar famously declared that he was born in Mississippi and he was gonna die in Mississippi. This army veteran and Alcorn A & M College graduate was unalterably committed to the fight. The very night he was brutally murdered outside his home, in earshot of his wife and children, President Kennedy had spoken on television in support of civil rights, and about the “moral crisis” white racists were causing as they staunchly resisted Black progress. Later, the High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone would record a song, Mississippi Goddamn, citing the 1963 deaths of Medgar Evers and the four little Black girls who were murdered in a Birmingham, AL church bombing by white racists as the catalysts for the song.

After her husband’s senseless death, Myrlie Evers fought mightily to keep his name alive. She wrote the book, For Us, the Living, which was made into a movie, starring Howard Rollins and Irene Cara. Myrlie also continued Medgar’s work—eventually becoming the board chairwoman for the NAACP—and she relentlessly pursued getting a conviction against her husband’s assassin. The Evers’ home is now a museum; and a movie, The Ghosts of Mississippi, starring Whoopi Goldberg, depicts Myrlie’s long, arduous fight to get Medgar’s killer convicted. (It’s hard to watch, but here is the trailer for that movie.) Joy-Ann Reid is touring and talking about her new book. This interview is fire!📚

Brilliant poet, author, Prince scholar, and academic, C Liegh McInnis, wrote and performed a phenomenal poem to honor Medgar Evers last year, (during the 60th anniversary of his murder).

Sports

The Super Bowl is upon us! Take a look at the work of the best young sports journalist out there! He’s mind-blowing and a great example of what our kids can accomplish when they are free to learn, dream, and create without adults complicating their lives.

Also, activists are planning to protest the Super Bowl

Kid’s Corner

Inventor Granville T. Woods, an electrical engineer, revolutionized mass transportation systems, among other things. 👶🏽

Mental Wellness

Emotional fluency: Safe spaces for Black boys and their emotions

The power of a good educator! Singer Adele’s heartwarming gratitude for her former teacher.

☮️

Humor

Pulling up at work and leaving, too

Side-eyeing a colleague 

Find Peace

Find your groove like this beautiful soul—she’s groovin’ & groovin’ some more 

Education and Liberation

Speaking of South Carolina, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Blacks in South Carolina, as in many other places, began to thrive! Historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. in his book, Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction 1867-1877, records some of the many triumphs of Black South Carolinians right after the Civil War, all of which were dismantled by white rage and jealousy. Although some Whites were agreeable to coalescing and building an egalitarian interracial society, many Whites decided that productive Black people, who simply wanted to be free and to participate in governance and the economy, were a threat to their false and misguided sense of racial superiority. But for a brief shining moment, Black people were progressing well. (Again, remember, Black people constituted the majority.)

Bennett’s book described the sense of hope that animated Black Charlestonians on Tuesday, January 14, 1868: “76 Black men, many of them former slaves, and 48 White men, some of them former slave owners, are already gathering to write a new constitution for the state of South Carolina.” Black people were jubilant, excited about their prospects, rejoicing in their freedom, working hard as they anticipated full equality and more wondrous changes that seemed to be on the horizon. Bennett further writes: “In their revolutionary innocence, these people actually believed that all things are going to be made new…Now after hundreds of years of blood and whips and chains, the color of power is changing and Black people are scurrying through the white and watchful streets…”

Bennett notes that a Northerner reporting on the assemblage of Black Constitutional Convention goers wrote that they were “so remarkable that the Charleston journals’ cannot help remarking it, pointing out that many of the colored delegates [are] so intelligent and respectable-looking.”

But many White people were disgruntled. Bennett writes, “…the old aristocrats sit now, disconsolate, behind shuttered windows in the quaint, slate-covered houses…To them and their allies, this is the first day of hell. Evil men, they say, have taken their power and have given it to their former slaves. An ‘ignorant and depraved race’ has been placed ‘in power and influence above the virtuous, the educated and the refined.’ It is an insult, sir, to ‘Anglo-Saxon race and blood,’ ‘to God and to nature’… Day and night, the old planters speak of nothing else…” Bennett wrote that after a “turbulent period [just after the Civil War] of riots and church burnings and whippings and demonstrations” Black perseverance was about to bear a “harvest.”

Indeed, even as they were being lied about and demonized as “ignorant and illiterate,” the truth is that the leading Black delegates were lawyers, businessmen, teachers, ministers and former Union soldiers. Even those who had been formerly enslaved were carpenters, coachmen, barbers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and teachers. Many of the men were highly distinguished, including Robert Brown Elliott, who was a brilliant, well-educated orator (who would later get the better of Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy on the floor of Congress, in a highly publicized debate). Elliot continued his brilliant oratory when he was elected to Congress. In talking about the Klan, while debating the merits of the Ku Klux Klan bill in Congress in 1870, he asserted, “Every Southern gentleman should blush with shame at this pitiless and cowardly persecution of the Negro. It is the custom of democratic journals to stigmatize the Negroes of the South as being barbarous. But gentlemen, tell me, who is the barbarian here?”

Robert Smalls, was a formerly enslaved man, who had deftly and ingeniously navigated a Confederate ship out of Charleston Harbor to freedom, with his wife, children, and several other enslaved human beings in tow. In doing so, he delivered to the Union Navy important intelligence about Confederate operations, as well as a floating arsenal—making himself a hero. And there was Richard Harvey Cain, described as “eloquent, shrewd, and enterprising,” and the minister of the huge congregation at Emanuel AME Church where Denmark Vesey had been one of the founders. (The church has roots that go all the way back to 1791; and it is also the rebuilt church where nine beautiful human beings perished, after Bible study, at the hands of a white supremacist killer in 2015.)

Historian Eric Foner, has written that South Carolina had a Black majority legislature during Reconstruction, including 210 African Americans who served in the state House of Representatives and 29 who served in the state Senate. The state also had two Black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state and treasurer, and other elected local officials, including sheriffs, school board members and justices of the peace.

But, again, far too many whites were enraged at the success of these free Black men and they fomented destruction. They manufactured, spoke, and wrote vicious lies about the competency and morality of Blacks. Despite the fact that many of the Blacks in power and influence were smarter, better spoken, and more ethical than their white counterparts, in addition to being desirous of a democratic society, it was Whites who controlled the media and the overall legal apparatus of the day. They put forth horrendous imagery (cartoons and other deplorable depictions), and newspaper reports chock full of lies about the Black elected officials. Moreover, in South Carolina—and all across the South—Whites were soon able to effectively overthrow the hard work of Black people and bring about a dysfunctional, violent, neo-slavery styled Jim Crow society.

“If you can’t be free, be a mystery.” Rita Dove, poet

Heal Our Community: Group Therapy

Listen to this wonderfully enlightening and entertaining podcast about the brilliant Black Congressmen in office during Reconstruction. It will make you smile, and help you heal. (And the truth shall make you free.)

Erratum:  In the last SHE Newsletter, one of our links to an article about world-class Black cyclist, Major Taylor, the first Black global sports superstar (whose father served in the Civil War) was incorrect. Here it is, and it’s a fascinating read about triumph in the face of absurd racism. (There’s also a movie in the works.)

SHE (Surviving, Healing, and Evolving)

“Unlocking Healing, Fearlessness, and Freedom”

🤎

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(All photographic images in this Newsletter, except the Stono marker, are from Adobe stock.)

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