Liz Taylor's 60's Cleopatra Look Busting Out at the Grammy Awards!

Fashion: Folk vs Funk Life Imitiates Art!

The Devil & Mr Robertson You can't see Haiti from his house...

As many of you may now know, Pat Robertson
recently declared that Haiti's plight of poverty and
the country's recent earthquake can be traced back
to their, "pact to the devil" to gain liberation from
the French in the 1800's.

There's no labeling the French colonial rulers sinners
for their enslavement and murder of Haitians while pillaging the island's resources, or mention that Haiti's successful overthrow paralleled American thought and efforts in seeking similar liberty
from the English.

That "Kristi," an African American sits their nodding
in agreement speaks volumes to how we are used as "props" to endorse statements otherwise lacking in fact and critical thinking by people like Pat Robertson, who ignorantly spout what they purport to be truisms about our history and culture to their audiences.

“Whatever defamation
of character my enemies are spreading about me,
I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm.”

Toussaint Louverture
Haitian Liberator

“My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world.”

Napoleon Bonaparte
French Ruler

“But the prejudice of race alone blinded the American people for the debt they owed to the desperate courage of 500,000 Haitian Negroes who would not be enslaved.”

Henry Adams
America’s foremost Historian of the 18th and 19th centuries

Harlem Social Diary: Percy E. Sutton Political Trailblazer, Dies at 89

“Suffer the hurts, but don’t show the anger,

because if you do,

it will block you from being able to effectively do anything to remove the hurts.”

- Percy Sutton

By Douglas Martin / New York Times - December 27, 2009

Percy E. Sutton, a pioneering figure who represented Malcolm X as a young lawyer and became one of the nation’s most prominent black political and business leaders, died in a Manhattan nursing home on Saturday, his family said. He was 89.


Percy E. Sutton served as Manhattan borough president and was Malcolm X's lawyer.

Entering politics in the early 1950s, Mr. Sutton rose from the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem to become the longest-serving Manhattan borough president and, for more than a decade, the highest-ranking black elected official in New York City.

Mr. Sutton, whose passion for civil rights was inherited from his father, was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s, yet once described himself as “an evolutionist rather than a revolutionist” in matters of race. “You ought always to keep the lines of communication open with those with whom you disagree,” he said.

He was the senior member of the group of prominent Harlem politicians who became known, sometimes derisively, as the Gang of Four. The other three were David N. Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor; Representative Charles B. Rangel; and Basil A. Paterson, who was a state senator and New York’s secretary of state. Mr. Sutton was also a mentor to Mr. Paterson’s son, Gov. David A. Paterson.

“It was Percy Sutton who talked me into running for office, and who has continued to serve as one of my most valued advisers ever since,” Governor Paterson said in a statement on Saturday night.

In a statement on Sunday, President Obama called Mr. Sutton “a true hero to African-Americans in New York City and around the country.”

Mr. Sutton was the first seriously regarded black candidate for mayor when he ran in 1977. But after he finished fifth in a seven-way Democratic primary, his supporters saw the loss as a stinging rebuke of his campaign’s strenuous efforts to build support among whites. Still, Mr. Dinkins, who was elected in 1989, called Mr. Sutton’s failed bid indispensable to his own success.

“I stand on the shoulders of Percy Ellis Sutton,” he later said.

Mr. Sutton’s business empire included, over the years, radio stations, cable television systems and national television programs. Another business invested in Africa. Still another sold interactive technology to radio stations.

Mr. Sutton had an immaculately groomed beard and mustache, tailored clothing and a sonorous voice that prompted a nickname, “wizard of ooze.” Associates called him “the chairman,” a nickname more to his liking.

Percy Ellis Sutton, the last child in a family of 15 children, was born on Nov. 24, 1920, in San Antonio and grew up on a farm nearby in Prairie View, Tex. His father, Samuel Johnson Sutton, born in the last days of slavery, was the principal of a segregated high school in San Antonio. His mother, Lillian, was a teacher.

The 12 children who survived into adulthood went to college, with the older ones giving financial and moral support to the younger. (One of the brothers, Oliver C. Sutton, became a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan.)

His father was an early civil rights activist who farmed, sold real estate and owned a mattress factory, a funeral home and a skating rink — in addition to being a full-time educator.

Percy milked the cows and sometimes helped his father deliver milk to the poor, riding in the same Studebaker that was used for funerals.

At 12, he stowed away on a passenger train to New York, where he slept under a sign on 155th Street. Far from being angry, his family regarded him as an adventurer, he later said.

From an early age, he bristled at prejudice. At 13, while passing out N.A.A.C.P. leaflets in an all-white neighborhood, he was beaten by a policeman.

Mr. Sutton attended Prairie View A & M, as well as Tuskegee in Alabama and Hampton University in Virginia, without earning a degree. During college, he took up stunt-flying on the barnstorming circuit, but gave it up after a friend crashed.












When World War II began, he tried to enlist in Texas but was turned away. He finally enlisted in New York, and served as an intelligence officer with the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed all-black unit of the Army Air Forces. He won combat stars in the Italian and Mediterranean theaters.

After the war, Mr. Sutton entered Columbia Law School on the G.I. Bill on the basis of his solid college grades, but transferred to Brooklyn Law School because he worked two jobs — at a post office from 4 p.m. until midnight, then as a subway conductor until 8:30 in the morning. He reported to law school at 9:30. This schedule continued for three years until he graduated.

The punishing pace so annoyed his wife, the former Leatrice O’Farrell, that she divorced him in 1950 — only to remarry him in 1952. In between, he married and divorced Eileen Clark.

Mr. Sutton is survived by his wife, Leatrice; a son from their marriage, Pierre; a daughter from his second marriage, Cheryl Lynn Sutton; his sister, Essie Mae Sutton of New York; and four grandchildren.

Percy Sutton Funeral Services 1.6.2009:

Pearl Harbor - 68th Anniversary African American Hero "Dorie" Miller

Born on Columbus Day 1919, Doris “Dorie” Miller grew up in Waco, Texas, where he played fullback on the high school football team. In September 1939, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a mess attendant, third class.

The following January he was assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia and soon became the ship’s heavyweight boxing champion. Miller was aboard the West Virginia at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. He was assigned to help carry wounded sailors on deck to safer locations before taking control of an unattended antiaircraft gun, which he loaded and fired at enemy planes until he ran out of ammunition.












For his bravery, Dorie Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, becoming the first African-American sailor to win this high honor. In 1942, he was recruited to go on tour to sell war bonds, and his name and face became well known. Miller, later a messman on the USS Liscombe Bay, was killed when the aircraft carrier sank in the Pacific in November 1943.

The 1943 poster(top) of Miller by famed jazz record cover illustrator David Stone Martin was based on the photograph(above) and was used by the Navy as a recruiting poster.

Roy DeCarava, Photographer dies at 89 Depicted African American Life

Roy DeCarava, an art photographer whose pictures of everyday life in Harlem helped clarify the African American experience for a wider audience, has died. He was 89.He died Tuesday in New York City, his daughter Wendy DeCarava said. The cause was not given.

DeCarava (pronounced Dee-cuh-RAH-vah) photographed Harlem during the 1940s, '50s and
'60s with an insider's view of the subway stations, restaurants, apartments and especially the people
who lived in the predominantly African American neighborhood. He also was well known for his candid shots of jazz musicians -- many of them taken in smoky clubs using only available light. Shadow and darkness became hallmarks of DeCarava's style."Roy was one of the all-time great photographers," Arthur Ollman, founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, said in 2005. "

His photographs provided a vision of African American life that members of the white fine art photography establishment could not have accessed on their own."DeCarava's first major exhibit was at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego in 1986. Ten years later, he was the subject of a one-man exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City."What's extraordinary about the pictures is the way they capture his lyrical sense of life," Jonathan Galassi, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said in a 1996 interview with ABC. "You see pain, you see anger and you see an extraordinary quality of tenderness," Galassi said in a separate interview with CBS.

Using a small, 35-millimeter camera that allowed him freedom to roam, DeCarava captured spontaneous moments. He shot in black and white, creating highly impressionistic images, and printed in a style that produced velvety shades of gray and black.Some of his earliest photos show young couples dancing in their kitchen on a Saturday night, and a father and his children dressed in their Sunday best, watching the Harlem River go by. He photographed men talking together in a basement that doubled as their clubhouse. DeCarava told National Public Radio in a 1996 interview that when he started taking pictures "there were no black images of dignity, no images of beautiful black people. There was this big hole. I tried to fill it."

He did not ignore the problems of the black community, but usually addressed them in subtle ways. One of his best known photographs shows a young woman in a long white gown and a corsage who stands in rubble outside a tenement house. She is in sunlight, facing shadows. The image raises obvious questions about her future.

As a young photographer, DeCarava saw his share of overt racism, said Ollman, who interviewed him at length for the 1986 exhibit in San Diego. The social upheavals of the 1960s improved the situation."Photo editors came along who could relate to editorial dissidence," Ollman said. DeCarava's uncommon subject matter became more accepted, but he still experienced racism of a different sort. "Roy was sometimes referred to as a black photographer, a qualifier that can be a subtle attempt to marginalize someone," Ollman said. If there were few images of beautiful black people before DeCarava made them, there were also few black photographers who had achieved wide recognition.Gordon Parks, seven years older than DeCarava, broke the color line in photojournalism in the 1940s, shooting for Life, Look and other national magazines. James VanDerZee became known beyond the black community for his portraits of middle-class African Americans that offer glimpses into Harlem in the 1920s and '30s. But DeCarava's interest in photography as art led him in another direction.

Soon after DeCarava started taking photographs in the late 1940s, he found a powerful mentor in Edward Steichen, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who encouraged DeCarava to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship.DeCarava was the first black photographer to receive the grant, in 1952. He used the $3,200 to support himself during his first year of photographing in Harlem.The images he took that year became a book, "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" (1955), with text by Langston Hughes, the foremost black poet of his time.

Harlem's Social Diary 9.16.2009 Mary Schmidt Campbell Obama Announces Arts Nomimation

President Obama said, "My administration is committed to economic recovery, pushing the boundaries of science and space exploration and investing in the future of arts and the humanities, and these individuals will serve my team well as we work to accomplish these goals. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead."

Mary Schmidt Campbell, Vice Chairman, President's Committee on the Arts and HumanitiesMary Schmidt Campbell has been dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts since 1991. Dean Campbell began her career in New York as the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Under her leadership, the Studio Museum in Harlem emerged as a major national and international cultural institution and a lynchpin of the economic revival of Harlem. In 1987, Mayor Edward I. Koch invited Dr. Campbell to serve as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York. Dean Campbell holds a B.A. degree in English literature from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in art history from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in humanities, also from Syracuse.

She is co-author of Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987) and Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press & The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1991). She is the co-editor of Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2006.) She is currently working on a book on Romare Bearden for Oxford University Press, (2011 expected publication date). She sits on the board of The American Academy in Rome and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In the fall of 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served in the voluntary position of Chair of the New York State Council on the Arts from 2007-2009. She also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Tisch Asia, the Tisch School of the Arts Singapore campus.