Category: Girls

Chicago play ‘Lines in the Dust’ Takes on Families and Residency Fraud in Public Schools.

It would be a disservice to relegate the play Lines in the Dust as a compulsory offering of social protest fiction and bandwagon outpour, seeking attention on entitlement that audiences passively care about its themes and subjects to indict structural racism in America. To applaud it on such terms demeans the work below its highest merit as an actor’s play; it simply uses … Continue reading Chicago play ‘Lines in the Dust’ Takes on Families and Residency Fraud in Public Schools. →

Read excerpt of my next novel SPEAKING OF SUMMER in Intellectual Refuge Literary Journal…

In "Speaking of Summer," the Black women appear to have it all: great homes, men, careers, girlfriends, beauty. But there is a cost to keeping the realities of how they feel about their treatment in the world such a closed secret... I thank editor Christopher Schnieders for publishing this small piece of it and I look forward to finishing it, to share more to come!

Little Rock Nine, Four Little Girls, and One Confederate Flag: A Retrospective

One way to move this tragedy and the deceased in it past public ephemera and into history is to forever connect the loss of their lives to a national symbolic act against domestic terrorism: the legally-mandated abolition of our Confederate flag, and civil prosecution of anyone who waves it.

Birthing a Slave: Reproduction and Inhumanity during America’s Slavery Era

To understand how the joyous occasion of motherhood was a form of suffering for black female slave, please read this excellent post on “the book Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South, by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. The book tells the history of a somewhat esoteric subject: the need of slaveholders, and the doctors they hired, to control and manage the bodies and reproductive lives of slave women.”

We can have more admiration for black mothers and families today if we understand just how much our ancestral histories included so many challenges meant to destroy them.

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Jubilo! The Emancipation Century

Most people know of slavery, but we don’t know about slavery. Specifically, we don’t know how dehumanizing it was to be a slave.

We might understand what it’s like to be denied freedom or dignity at an intellectual level. But for many of us, we don’t have a grasp on how horrible the institution was, in the day to day life of an enslaved person. Most of us don’t “get” what it was about inhuman bondage that made it so inhuman.

For example: what was it like to be slave mother?

Some insights on this are given in the book Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South, by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. The book tells the history of a somewhat esoteric subject: the need of slaveholders, and the doctors they hired, to control and manage the bodies and reproductive lives of slave women.

But while the subject is…

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