
Folklorist
of the month
Featured Articles
Andrew Rosa, author (top row, second from left); John H. Bracey, Jr. (front row, fourth from left), Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, South Carolina Oct. 2, 2019.
The question of roles within a power couple cannot be asked in isolation. Who takes care of the kids? Is the woman only prominent as a byproduct of the man’s prominence? If the man’s role is critical to society, should the woman simply accept the position of support for the greater good? Is the woman’s calling just as important as her partners?
Back in 2014, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo suffocated Eric Garner in a chokehold one long and hot summer day in Long Island, New York, scores of professional athletes decided to express their frustrations. Some kneeled while others donned shirts bearing the words, “I cant breathe” as a way to silently but visibly protest the continual confluence of Black death, racism, poverty, and endemic police brutality in the US. Many Black sports fans welcomed this expression of solidarity while many White fans did the exact opposite.
On May 4, 2023, when I walked into Joyride Studio at Chicago Avenue and Sacramento, not far from where I live on the West Side, I really didn’t know what would happen. With three guys from my band, I was going to play music behind a rap song.

Recent Articles
Thank you for making time to meditate on two prominent dates, April 4,1968, the day of Dr. Martin Luther King's Murder at the Lorraine Motel in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, and April 2, 2020, the evening our oldest sibling and sister "Cookie" died from Covid 19. Her vibrant 52-year-old Daughter, Melvenia, passed 8 hours later. We didn't know Mel was infected.
One hundred years since Fred Shannon’s life was stolen by a mob of white men in a small town in Eastern Kentucky. As I stand here, in this place, I can’t help but feel the weight of that century—one hundred years of silence, unanswered questions, and untold pain.
Soon after Freedom
Jim Crow was declared
Between Civil War and Civil Rights.
Holocaust like a virus spread
Another century went by
Your noose of deaf zeal is
As tight as the stem of strange fruit
As damning as the rod spared
As stifling as the bleached white hood of night
Andrew Rosa, author (top row, second from left); John H. Bracey, Jr. (front row, fourth from left), Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, South Carolina Oct. 2, 2019.
The question of roles within a power couple cannot be asked in isolation. Who takes care of the kids? Is the woman only prominent as a byproduct of the man’s prominence? If the man’s role is critical to society, should the woman simply accept the position of support for the greater good? Is the woman’s calling just as important as her partners?
Back in 2014, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo suffocated Eric Garner in a chokehold one long and hot summer day in Long Island, New York, scores of professional athletes decided to express their frustrations. Some kneeled while others donned shirts bearing the words, “I cant breathe” as a way to silently but visibly protest the continual confluence of Black death, racism, poverty, and endemic police brutality in the US. Many Black sports fans welcomed this expression of solidarity while many White fans did the exact opposite.
On May 4, 2023, when I walked into Joyride Studio at Chicago Avenue and Sacramento, not far from where I live on the West Side, I really didn’t know what would happen. With three guys from my band, I was going to play music behind a rap song.
There is a deep and complex battle that hovers over Charlotte. In competition, being the first usually comes with celebration; however, in a racist society, being the first usually comes with sorrow, anger, rage, or plain sickness. I’m not necessarily saying Charlotte felt any of those emotions, though it’ll be hard to believe she didn’t.
I think, in an essence, this means going beyond the superficial tendencies we have during this time of year. I refer to Lil Son Jackson, who sings
Did the descendants of the Confederate States of American create Native American tribes and appropriate heritage to profit off of government contracts and pose as American Indians?
Let's hear from Tom Acklen creator of the Bayou La Combe Choctaw, Jena Band of Mississippi Choctaw, MOWA Choctaw, and various Oklahoma nations have sanctioned various perpetual nefarious acts against the people of the Florida Parishes, Mississippi, Alabama and throughout the United States
Michelle Slater loves history. That’s a good thing because her family’s story is woven into Pittsburgh’s Hill District’s history about as tightly as possible. Slater’s grandmother wrote numbers for some of the Steel City’s best known numbers bankers

QUOTES
“ I just want to thank you and let you know how much I appreciate your work. Thank you for keeping our story straight. Thank you for the wonderful magazine, the podcasts, and EVERYTHING. I am a subscriber and contributor, so this is not empty praise. I love the work you and your wife do. Until I "found" you, I was getting discouraged about the preservation and promulgation of our culture. It was hard to find our blues anywhere without looking at others running it as their own. Painful really. I was glad to learn from Brother Yusef's article that there is a growing trend of young blacks taking up the blues. They don't get the exposure, but they are doing it. This brings a smile to my heart, as do you. Thank you. Much love
Gloria White”
Recent Podcasts
In this episode, I speak with Deidra R Moore Janvier, Esq. about her new book, From Me to You: The Power of Storytelling and Its Inherent Generational Wealth.
Daryl Davis, a musician, author, and race relations expert was assaulted with flying bottles during the Cub Scout parade in 1968 when he was 10. This was his first experience with racism. He spent years studying and researching to answer the question he had about racial hatred.

EMERGING FOLKLORISTS
Our goal is to encourage our youth to take an active role in independent research, documentation, archiving, and publishing of their ethnic and cultural history creating a more diverse platform in the field of traditional study and preservation.
Stuck in a different world away from the truth, and confused about why people treat you the way they do. James, a teen from a small town called Point Place in Wisconsin was living in that world, stuck in an alternate universe. At the outset of our story, James was a strong young man, given his home life, James struggled a little bit because his mom was a single parent raising two kids.
‘Clean Getaway’ is a chapter book by Nic Stone. The story is about a boy named William “Scoob” Lamar and his G’ma traveling across America in 2018 to finish a trip G’ma tried to take when she was younger, but never finished.

Jack Dappa
Blues Radio
Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation is a focal point for the research, archiving and raising awareness of African American Traditional Music and the Black Experience!!

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically”
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