Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Grave Necessity of Building And Sustaining A Radical National Movement For Justice, Freedom, and Self Determination In An Oppressive Society Dedicated To The Denial and Destruction of Our Human and Civil Rights

"I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression."
--Malcolm X



Renewing the Struggle for Racial Justice, Post-Ferguson
 
We must face the true causes of the chasm between white and black America.


The Editors 
August 27, 2014
The Nation     

This article appeared in the September 15, 2014 edition of The Nation.

Aaron Coleman, left, joins other protesters marching on Florissant Road in Ferguson, Missouri (AP Photo/Sid Hastings)

Ferguson, Missouri. Sanford, Florida. Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Oakland. Chicago. Staten Island. The grim roster of cities where police or vigilante violence has resulted in the death of an African-American just keeps growing. The streets of Ferguson have quieted now, after roiling for eleven days with the anguish of protesters demanding justice for Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old who was shot by a police officer on August 9 after being stopped for walking in the street. The police, fortified by a Pentagon program that provides surplus military equipment to civilian law enforcement—with no training requirements and little oversight—responded with riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets. (President Obama has ordered a review of the program, but any attempt to curb it will be met with resistance.)

Yet it’s not only the deaths that have sparked fury. It’s also the realization on the part of those horrified and traumatized by the killings that many Americans are willing to accept and excuse the state and individual violence visited upon black Americans. We see this acceptance in the grave injustices following these deaths: the police in Ferguson left Brown’s body in the street for hours, without even covering it, and refused to provide details about the shooting, instead releasing misleading information about what precipitated his fatal encounter with the officer. The police in Sanford, Florida, didn’t arrest George Zimmerman until forty-five days after he had killed Trayvon Martin, and a jury later acquitted him of murder and manslaughter. This divide is reflected in the fact that, according to a Pew poll, 80 percent of African-Americans felt that the shooting of Michael Brown raised important issues about race, while only 37 percent of whites did. On one side of the chasm, people are in agony; the other side is acting like there’s nothing wrong at all.

Those who are in agony, however, increasingly know that they are not alone. And the anger sparked by these incidents of inhumanity is no longer isolated. As Mychal Denzel Smith explores in this special issue, young black organizers are laying the groundwork for a new grassroots movement for racial equality, focused on the critical issues facing African-Americans today: not just police brutality but mass incarceration, unemployment, voting rights, educational disparities and more. As the fiftieth anniversary of many of the civil-rights movement’s proudest accomplishments passes, these activists are registering voters, delivering petitions, drafting legislation—and creating community. While many of these groups were born out of the pain of Trayvon Martin’s killing, they aren’t solely focused on that death. Instead, they are developing a democratic, inclusive leadership model that brings a diverse set of concerns to their work.

As this new grassroots network comes into its own, one very prominent voice has joined theirs to call attention to the plight of African-Americans and Latinos. Last February, President Obama launched My Brother’s Keeper, a $300 million initiative to close the “opportunity gaps” facing boys and young men of color. The problem, writes Dani McClain in this issue, is not only that the effort neglects the needs of girls and young women of color, but also that the initiative focuses on changing the behavior of the very people who are victims of discrimination, harassment and violence, rather than confronting its sources. Pressing us all to face and remedy the true causes of the chasm separating white America from black and brown America will be the vital work of this new vanguard of activists.

Read more from our special issue on racial justice:


Mychal Denzel Smith: “How Trayvon Martin’s Death Launched a New Generation of Black Activism”

Paula J. Giddings: “It’s Time for a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement”

Rinku Sen: “As People of Color, We’re Not All in the Same Boat”

Dani McClain: “Obama’s Racial Justice Initiative—for Boys Only”

Frank Barat: “A Q&A With Angela Davis on Black Power, Feminism and the Prison-Industrial Complex”

Melissa Harris-Perry: “Obama Is Responsible for the Protests in Ferguson—but Not in the Way You Think ”



http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/us/2-convicted-in-1983-north-carolina-murder-freed-after-dna-tests.html?_r=0


"Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other"
--Angela Davis

"There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you."

--Amiri Baraka

U.S.

DNA Evidence Clears Two Men in 1983 Murder

By JONATHAN M. KATZ and ERIK ECKHOLM
September 2, 2014
New York Times

 
Henry Lee McCollum wiped tears at a hearing Tuesday in Lumberton, N.C., where a judge declared him and his half brother Leon Brown innocent and ordered them both released from prison.
Credit: Chuck Liddy/The News & Observer
 
 Mr. Leon Brown, 46, has been serving a life sentence. Mr. McCollum, 50, has spent three decades on death row. They were expected to be freed on Wednesday. Credit Chuck Liddy/The News & Observer

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential harm from false, coerced confessions and of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

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FEB. 21, 2014


As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a Superior Court judge in Robeson County, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and Mr. McCollum’s death sentence and ordering their release. The courtroom erupted into a standing ovation.

Mr. Brown, 46, has been serving a life sentence. Mr. McCollum, 50, has spent three decades on death row. They were expected to be freed on Wednesday. Credit Chuck Liddy/The News & Observer

“We waited all these long years for this,” said James McCollum, the father of the man released from death row. “Thank you, Jesus,” he repeated.

The exoneration ends decades of legal and political battles over a case that became notorious in North Carolina and received nationwide discussion, vividly reflecting the country’s fractured views of the death penalty.

The two young defendants were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, the 6-foot-6, Bible-quoting district attorney who was later profiled by “60 Minutes” as the country’s “deadliest D.A.” because he sought the death penalty so often.

For death penalty supporters, the horrifying facts of the girl’s rape and murder only emphasized the justice of applying the ultimate penalty. As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party put Mr. McCollum’s booking photograph on campaign fliers that accused a Democratic candidate of being soft on crime, according to The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.

In 1994, when the United States Supreme Court turned down a request to review the case, Justice Antonin Scalia described Mr. McCollum’s crime as so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection. But Justice Harry A. Blackmun, in a dissent, noted that Mr. McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old and that “this factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in this case is unconstitutional.”

The exoneration based on DNA evidence was another example of the way tainted convictions have unraveled in recent years because of new technology and legal defense efforts like those of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit legal group in North Carolina that took up the case.

In the courtroom here on Tuesday, the current district attorney, Johnson Britt (no relation to the original prosecutor), citing his obligation to “seek justice,” not simply gain convictions, said he would not try to prosecute the men again because the state “does not have a case.”

Mr. McCollum was 19 and Mr. Brown was 15 when they were picked up by the police in Red Springs, a town of fewer than 4,000 people in the southern part of the state, on the night of Sept. 28, 1983. The officers were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie, 11, who had been raped and suffocated with her underwear crammed down her throat, her body left in a soybean field.

No physical evidence tied Mr. McCollum or Mr. Brown, both African-American, as was the victim, to the crime. But a local teenager cast suspicion on Mr. McCollum, who with his half brother had recently moved from New Jersey and was considered an outsider.

After five hours of questioning with no lawyer present and with his mother weeping in the hallway, not allowed to see him, Mr. McCollum told a story of how he and three other youths attacked and killed the girl.

“I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and threatening me,” Mr. McCollum said in a recent videotaped interview with The News & Observer. “I just made up a story and gave it to them so they would let me go home.”

After he signed a statement written in longhand by investigators, he asked, “Can I go home now?” according to an account by his defense lawyers.

Before the night was done, Mr. Brown, after being told that his half brother had confessed and facing similar threats that he could be executed if he did not cooperate, also signed a confession. Both men subsequently recanted at trial, saying their confessions had been coerced. The other two men mentioned in Mr. McCollum’s confession were never prosecuted.

Both defendants initially received death sentences for murder. After new trials were ordered by the State Supreme Court, Mr. McCollum was again sentenced to death, while Mr. Brown was convicted only of rape, and his sentence was reduced to life. (In later years, the Supreme Court barred the death penalty for minors and the

Lawyers from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, working with private law firms, began pressing for DNA testing of the physical evidence in the case, which included a cigarette butt found near sticks used in the murder.

Recent DNA testing by an independent state agency, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, of evidence gathered in the initial investigation found a match for the DNA on the cigarette butt — not to either of the imprisoned men, but to Roscoe Artis, who lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found and who had a history of convictions for sexual assault.

Only weeks after the murder, in fact, Mr. Artis confessed to the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl in Red Springs. Mr. Artis received a death sentence, later reduced to life, for that crime and remains in prison. Officials never explained why, despite the remarkable similarities in the crimes, they kept their focus on Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown even as the men proclaimed their innocence.

The only witness at the hearing Tuesday was Sharon Stellato of the innocence inquiry commission, who under questioning from defense lawyers described the lack of evidence tying the two men to the crime as well as the DNA findings implicating Mr. Artis. The district attorney said he had no evidence to the contrary.

Joe Freeman Britt, the original prosecutor, told The News & Observer last week that he still believed the men were guilty.

After Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown returned to prison to file the paperwork for their release, which to the frustration of defense lawyers and the men’s relatives was delayed, apparently until Wednesday.

As exoneration appeared likely, Mr. McCollum recently reflected on his fate.

“I have never stopped believing that one day I’d be able to walk out that door,” he said in the videotaped interview with The News & Observer.

“A long time ago, I wanted to find me a good wife, I wanted to raise a family, I wanted to have my own business and everything,” he said. “I never got a chance to realize those dreams.

“Now I believe that God is going to bless me to get back out there.”

Jonathan M. Katz reported from Lumberton, and Erik Eckholm from New York

Sunday, August 31, 2014

The Structural, Institutional, Systemic, and Visceral Dominance of White Supremacy, the Real National History Of the United States, And the Ongoing Ominous Lessons Of Ferguson, Missouri--PART 3

WELCOME TO THE UNITED HATES OF HYSTERIA: LAND OF THE SPREE, HOME OF THE KNAVE, AND ETERNAL DOMAIN OF THE 3H CLUB: HATRED HUBRIS AND HYPOCRISY: 2014 EDITION


http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/29/bad-apples-in-ferguson/

WEEKEND EDITION AUGUST 29-31, 2014

The Media: When in Doubt, Blame Blacks

Bad Apples in Ferguson
by ISHMAEL REED
CounterPunch
 
ISHAMEL REED

Given the fact that the Jim Crow media are dominated by the POVs of middle and upper-class whites, mostly males, it was no surprise that most of the commentary and reporting about Ferguson was managed by people who never experienced racial profiling. People like CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, Harvard graduate and Harvard married, who has said that the charges of prosecutorial misconduct are ridiculous. Another know-it-all-nik named Marc Fernich, appearing on Al Jazeera on August 24,2014 called “preposterous,” a claim made by the St.Louis NAACP head, Adolphus Prultt, 2nd, that the police occupation of Ferguson was similar to how Palestinians had been greeted by the forces of occupation. He was unaware that Palestinians were sending advice to the residents of Ferguson about how to handle tear gas. Palestinian writer, Amer Zahr, in his article, August 17th,” BEING BLACK, BEING PALESTINIAN wrote “It is hard for me to see Ferguson through anything other than Palestinian eyes.

“The killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, as he was unarmed and reportedly surrendering, has triggered protests in Missouri against aggressive police action.  The protests have been met, quite expectedly, with aggressive police action.  This aggressive police action will be met with more protests and on and on we go.  Sound familiar?

“The similarities between Ferguson and Palestine are stark.  Shared experiences, sentiments, and anger abound.  As it turns out, being black here and being Palestinian over there aren’t really that different.”

The smarmy Joe Klein waded in for Time about how black culture was responsible for the death of Michael Brown. He used the same argument in New York magazine   May 7,1989 that was typically lengthy and pompous piece about the Central Park Five. All about our morals from a man who lied about his authorship of “Primary Colors.” Of course, the five were innocent. Is there such a thing in journalism as plagiarizing oneself and getting paid by an organization like Time for engaging in this practice, repeatedly? No wonder FAIR calls Klein, “the media spokesperson for white people,” well he’s not quite white to young whites, who, according to The New York Times article about how the American Nazis are recruiting them. Klein is the guy who claimed, recently, and unopposed, that black men were responsible for the country’s rape problem. Black girls get raped by their mother’s boyfriends according to him. Tell that to the white co-eds who are raped by white men in college on a regular basis. Black men aren’t in college. They’re in jail.

We can’t get Joe to comment on the domestic violence against Jewish women in the United States and Israel. He’s part of the cover-up. How about a lengthy piece about this problem for New York magazine?

Predictably, just as the media were stenographers for the Pentagon during the Iraq war, they, like Marc Fernich, behaved as a sort of a press agent for Ferguson law enforcement and a cheering section for Darren Wilson, who might have shot an unarmed Michael Brown twelve times.  The media concentrated on the violence committed by a few, who were present in the mostly peaceful demonstrations and not on the violence of the police, who putout a lower case tonkin gulf propaganda spiel, which the media also fell for. All about Molotov cocktails provoking them into action. Three black ministers who were present where one Molotov cocktail incident was supposed to have taken place said that they didn’t see any. This gave the police, which was armed as though they were in Afghanistan, to assault men women and children with tear gas, while calling them “niggers.” Those who called 911 to report Michael Brown’s death, his body being allowed to lie in the sun for four hours (to show what happens when you fuck with the police), said that the dispatchers called them monkeys.

Fox News, Goebbels America, picked up a rumor about Wilson having his eye socket damaged by Brown. This lie was repeated by the Zimmerman/Wilson network, CNN. Their regular, Mark O’Mara, the character who lied about Trayvon Martin’s past and threatened the white women on the jury with the specter of black rape if they didn’t vote for an acquittal of Zimmerman. You could understand why some of the media would support Wilson, but The New York Times, whose editorial page, except for Paul Krugman, and Ishmael Reed from time to time, reads like a Tea Party Rally, was reprimanded twice by its Public Editor for behaving as a kind of pro bono defense counsel for Darren Wilson. First, Lawrence O’Donnell found support from the public editor of the Times when he accused the Times of floating a misleading line in its efforts to keep the right wing among its readership happy. O’Donnell said the Time’s report that there were “sharply” different versions among those who witnessed the shooting was false. In one front page Time’s story the murderer was called “well-mannered…soft-spoken…a good kid “while Michael Brown, who never killed anybody was “a teenager grappling with problems and promise.” When a cop killed Oscar Grant out here, a local paper called the cop, “a gentle giant.” Next the Times got into trouble when a black reporter wrote that Michael Brown “was no angel.” Answering “the storm” of protests that followed his comment, Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote in a post on Monday afternoon that the “no angel” term was “an ill-chosen phrase”: ”In my view, the timing of the article (on the day of Mr. Brown’s funeral) was not ideal. Its pairing with a profile of Mr. Wilson seemed to inappropriately equate the two people. And “no angel” was a blunder,” Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan also interviewed the reporter who wrote the article, John Eligon, who said he agrees “no angel” was a poor choice of words. Eligon also said he pressed editors on another part of the article that’s drawn criticism – Brown’s interest in rap.

I tried to weigh in as someone who has experienced racial profiling, most recently when walking with my companion in the historic Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. The people in the cemetery office called the police. They got there promptly. We had a hard time getting them to solve the drug traffic in our neighborhoods. Sometimes they didn’t even show up. Elderly members at our Crime Council meetings question, regularly, why the police are so chummy with the drug dealers. Wonder why. But they showed up about five minutes after I entered the cemetery. Maybe I was going to rob some graves? The Oakland police run the city. Though racial profiling is rampant, The East Bay Express has accused the current crop of mayoral candidates of supporting racial profiling. That’s because they brought police Chief Bratton out here to advise them on “stop and frisk,” and paid him a $200,000 consultant fee.

The Times told me that they had enough comments about Ferguson. The majority was written by white men. The police show them their Dr.Jekyll side. We get Mr. Hyde. These commentators are the ones who put out the lie that only a few bad apples in police departments are responsible for racial profiling; thirty police were involved in a scandal in Harlem Precinct in the 1990s.

I wanted to challenge the media’s use of polls to show that the issue of police brutality reflected disagreements between whites and blacks, when the police kill and beat the shit of Hispanics and Native Americans as well. Do the pollsters exclude the view of other ethnic and religious minorities like the Muslims who were spied upon by the notorious NYPD, because including them would challenge the views of their white readers and viewers? The people that Jeff Zuker of CNN and Comcast of MSNBC and Rush Limbaugh of Bain Capital’s  Clear Channel wish to woo. The people whom they depend upon to buy their shiny gas guzzlers and Viagra. Are the media again protecting whites from the charge that they’re ignorant of what’s happening between the police, to whom they give carte blanche to handle minorities anyway they wish, and the black Hispanic and Native Americans men and women who get murdered by the police on a regular basis. Unlike the toned down types, the black college professors whom MSNBC use to avoid paying full-time professional journalists like Michel Martin, black commentators like Earl Ofari Hutchinson and  Brooklyn-born rapper Talib Kweli were able to give a different account of what happened in Ferguson.

Davey D’s on KPFA’s “Hard Knock Radio,” and Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” had the best coverage because they aren’t beholden to media bosses to provide them with expense accounts and car. They interviewed people from the community and activists whose accounts on the ground were different from the accounts given by the police and the police friendly media. One woman told Amy Goodman that the Ferguson police broke down their apartment door and put 9 millimeter guns against her children’s heads because one of the kids didn’t tell his mother that he had received a citation for the theft of a Snicker’s bar. The three 10,11, and 12 spent thirty days in jail, while the criminals at Bank of America and Wells Fargo get to negotiate their fines. She said that her mother had warned her that the Ferguson police was a KKK outfit.

It took Davey D, Rose Clemente and Atty. John Burris to connect the police killings of Hispanics to that of blacks, which was ignored by the mainstream media.

After my Wednesday Aug.20th swim at the Berkeley YMCA, I ran into a retired 83 year old Hispanic judge. The situation in Ferguson came up. He said that there had been clashes in East L.A. between the police and Hispanics over police shootings.

On Thursday, Aug.21, Civil Rights Atty. John Burris, appearing on KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” said there had been four shootings of Hispanics by Salinas, California’s police since March. In one case, a Hispanic man, Carlos Mejia, was attempting to solicit some gardening work. According to Burris, he carried the gardening shears in his hand. Someone called the police. The police shot him when he turned toward them after walking away. The video is eerily similar to the Michael Brown. After this May 20,2014 shooting, Hispanic demonstrators protested. Some threw rocks and bottles at the police.

On August 27,even Joy Reid, one of the best commentators, said that police shootings of black men represented a Racial Divide between blacks and whites and that it wasn’t of concern for other minorities. She should travel west of the Rockies from time to time or is she just following the memos from higher ups?

Predictably, Jeff Zucker’s CNN even rushed on a Town Meeting about a rating driven Black and White divide. No Hispanics appeared on the panel even though the police have used lethal against them as well. Apparently nuance doesn’t draw ratings. Native Americans have issues with police brutality as well. Joy Reid should read the online Native American news service, Indian Country, from time to time. But for the men who own and whose POVs dominate the media, we lie.

One of the origins of the term “Indian Summer,” is that Indians lie so much that an Indian Summer is a false summer.

One could conclude that since the word of whites has more credibility, historically, than that of blacks, not to include the testimony by Hispanics, Native Americans and Muslims about their sometimes terrifying encounters with the police is to isolate blacks and cast them as unreasonable malcontents. Paranoid even and whining about “victimization,”and set up for a mismatch.

Finally, E.J.Dionne and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post discussed one of those White/Black polls on MSNBC.

You can understand why the regular pundits and their producers like Jeff Zucker might want to stage an opinion UFC match between Blacks and Whites for the entertainment of their viewers, but that these men of intellectual heft would cling to an outmoded model for race relations is depressing. The United States is no longer just Black and White.

Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch.  His information is at IshmaelReed.org.

Sources

1 Pacifica’s Mitch Jeserich hosts “Letters & Politics,” a look at burning political issues and debates, and their historical context, within the US and worldwide.(Burris interview was aired).

2 www.latinorebels.com/…/full-video-of-salinas-police-shooting-unarmed-,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLK0eo26MgE

3 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/21/separate-and-unequal-ferguson-has-implications-all-ethnicities-156516

4 http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/joe-klein-media-spokesperson-for-white-people/

5 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/bratton-slams-dirty-30-sgt-article-1.728555

copyright© 2014 Ishmael Reed


Ishmael Reed is the internationally acclaimed author of over twenty-five books (novels, essays, plays, and poetry)—including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, and lecturer. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater. He is also the publisher of Konch, an online literary and cultural arts magazine that he founded in 1990.

Two of Reed's books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and a book of poetry, Conjure, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His New and Collected Poems, 1964–2007, received the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal. A poem written in Seattle in 1969, "beware : do not read this poem", has been cited by Gale Research Company as one of the approximately 20 poems that teachers and librarians have identified as the most frequently studied in literature courses. Reed’s novels, poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Dutch, Korean, Chinese and Czech, among other languages.

Since 2012, Ishmael Reed has maintained the honor of being the first SF Jazz Poet Laureate from SF JAZZ, the leading non-profit jazz organization on the West Coast. An installation of his poem “When I Die I Will Go to Jazz” appears on the SFJAZZ Center’s North Gate in Linden Alley. LitQuake, the annual San Francisco Literary Festival, honored him with their 2011 Barbary Coast Award

Among Reed's other honors are writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. In 1995, he received the Langston Hughes Medal, awarded by City College of New York; in 1997, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, establishing a three-year collaboration with the Oakland-based Second Start Literacy Project in 1998.

In 1998, he also received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award. In 1999, he received a Fred Cody Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and was inducted into Chicago State University’s National Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent. Other awards include a Rene Castillo OTTO Award for Political Theatre (2002); a Phillis Wheatley Award from the Harlem Book Fair (2003); and in 2004, a Robert Kirsch Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, besides the D.C. Area Writing Project’s 2nd Annual Exemplary Writer’s Award and the Martin Millennial Writers, Inc. Contribution to Southern Arts Award, in Memphis, Tennessee. A 1972 manifesto inspired a major visual art exhibit, NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, curated by Franklin Sirmans for The Menil Collection in Houston, where it opened on June 27, 2008, and subsequently traveled to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, and the Miami Art Museum through 2009. Buffalo, New York, celebrated February 21, 2014, as Ishmael Reed Day, when he received Just Buffalo Literary Center's 2014 Literary Legacy Award.
ISHMAEL REED
b. 1938