Things to Do: Black History Month 2024 (Revised)

                                               We Family Love Daniel Raticliff; Akron Beacon Journal

February is African American History Month in the United States, and this year, in 2024, The American Mastodon Publication would like to help Black America set the narrative. Black History, is not solely for the profit and capitalism by Large American Corporations, but for the education and remembrance of the long history of Africans in America. In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black History," and author of The Miseducation of the Negro, initiated the celebration of Negro History Week to correspond with the birthdays of our great Forerunners, Frederick Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, Negro History Week, expanded to the entire month of February. This year, in 2024, we would like to reignite the spirit of commemoration of the African American experience and our Elders. Thus, we would like to challenge all African Americans to plan Family Reunions, Family Brunches, and to redraw Family Trees. We would also like to encourage African American Tours of Black Museums and African American Historical sites across the United States. These are Things to Do: Black History Month 2024

                                                     River Bend Reunion by John Holyfield

1. Plan Family Reunions or Family Brunches (Form Committees in the Family to organize the event & use family, local, & Black businesses to furnish the lodging, event space, decorations, food, and book signing.)

2. Draw Family Trees & create Photo Albums

3. Tour African American Museums and African American Historical Sites (This list does not include a complete list of Museums & Sites. For example, my favorite museum is the National Museum of Black American Music in Nashville Tennessee. Each State has specific African American Heritage Sites, for example, Florida, Fort Moses.

4. Plant Flowers & Tokens at the Cemetery to celebrate your Family Ancestors, who've "crossed over the river." Send your love, pray for their support, and make sure your children know where their loved ones are buried.

5. Attend Black History Festivals & Celebrations

6. Attend African Drum & Dance Class

7. Support Black American Businesses: Make a real effort to spend money within our community, beginning with businesses owned by your own family & friends.

8. Read a novel by an African or African American Author. The AMP Approved List of Short Stories & Novels will be updated continuously.

9. Enjoy African American Films. List will be updated.

10. Join or volunteer for a local African American organization.

The American Mastodon Publication is proud to celebrate Black History Month 2024 and to challenge African Americans to set their own narrative, organize family functions, and to educate themselves on the long experience of Africans in the United States.

Written by Cowan Amaye-Obu

Director Satuye Cultural Arts & Science Coalition/Editor of The Dancing Mastodon Magazine

Sources:

Black Art Depot

                                              Priceless Moments by Dennis Jinguo Dai

                                                               Papa's Girls by Robert Jackson

                                                              Courtin by John Holyfield

Sources:

How Negro History Week Became Black History Month; NY Times

Carter G Woodson; Association of African American Life & History

Miseducation of the Negro; Carter G Woodson 1936

National Museum of African American Music; Nashville, Tennessee

Frederick Douglas; National Park Service

Abraham Lincoln; White House

Wikipedia Foundation: African American Museums & African American Sites

Things Fall Apart; Chinua Achebe 1958

Southern Belle; Black Business 

Setting the Narrative for Black America

                                                        Photo Courtesy of: Myths of Propaganda
 

One of the most essential priorities for the leadership of Black African Americans is setting the Narrative for the people. Massive groups of people are impressionable and control of the narrative allows for the manipulation of behavior, cultural mores & taboos, as well as standard majority consensus. What Black Americans support, what Black Americans hate, and who Black Americans want to reward or punish, is all directed by the Narrative. Unfortunately, a national leadership directing the Narrative for Black African Americans with a population of over 45 million people, has been largely absent since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s, save the last survivor of the Avant Garde, massive Civil Rights Organizations Era, the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan has organized two separate Million Man Marches on the United States capital in Washington D.C., with commanding authority, loyalty, and respect enough among Black Americans to end both marches peacefully. The wealth of wisdom, knowledge of the struggles, and the extensive network of experience from the Nation of Islam is one of the last vestiges of collective Black power in the United States. However, the dominant hegemonies of The United States with various interests have invested in subverting the influence of Minister Farrakhan and any other national Black leadership. Largely, this allows for the control of the Black American economy by dictating the national agenda of Black America from the outside. The issues which matter, fashion, popular music, movies, and the entire culture dictated from the outside. In turn this allows for the widespread cashing out and wealth extraction from Black communities into the hands of outsiders. Setting the calendar and narrative is as imperative as breathing for of the national momentum of the entire group can be constantly derailed, misguided, and disinformed, then the group, like children following the Pied Piper, can be lead to their confusion or deaths by hypnosis.

                                                 Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress 2023

We must by all means end the dictation and hypnosis of our population. The greatest weapon of the West is propaganda. It is through propaganda that values, issues, concerns, traditions are advertised and expressed. Black America has been largely lost since the 1960s and the last of our national organizations. 

So, what is the Outside Hegemony instructing us to do in 2022-2023? How is it affecting our behavior? For example, the worldwide African population boom of 2016-2020, caused the Western Hegemony to enact a culling campaign within the worldwide population. Now, while the entire continent of Africa had performed better than any other region in the world and lost less lives to the campaign than Europe, Asia, the United States, or Brazil. The African American communities in North, Central, & South America under the direct colonization of the West, experienced a massive population loss and in the United States, over $75 million was set aside to advertise among African American influencers, celebrities, social programs, and Christian organizations, to have African American vaccinated. The paid propaganda is the instruction and so, it is by propaganda, African American organizers can determine what Outside Hegemonies are planning and their intentions. Another example, the fear of the Black Male in the United States has lead to the creation of the Prison Industrial system, which is a factory system for either pacification or the elimination of Black American Men in America.

                                                Photo Courtesy of NPR Mass Incarceration

 Now, Black labor is still worth well over $1.6 trillion dollars to the United States and Black labor is the commodity Africans have to offer since 1620. This labor must be taken up by African American women, but how will society get African American women to accept the incarceration of their men, and justify their leaving their husbands & children for massive entrance into the workforce in numbers? In 2018, American propaganda mills invented the "Genderless," phenotype and marched across the airwaves demanding Trans-LGBTQ rights to have access to public bathrooms in the South. Now, the invention of "Genderlessness," does two things, it questions the existence of gender and confuses the existence of gender roles or responsibilities. The entire argument for Trans-gender bathrooms is a farce. However, psychologically it invents confusion about what genders are entitled to do. Hence, in the aftermath of the Trans-gender Bathroom Argument, American students began to have trans- gender issues in public schools, where boys wanted to be identified as girls, and girls wanted to be identified as boys, officially. The entire argument was political theatre, as the American Medical establishment firmly purported that biology cannot be voluntarily decided. Still, the propaganda had already completed its mission. Black American women began to come out in support of the Trans-LGBTQ, and demanded their rights be respected. The rise in Black women participating in the Lesbian community skyrocketed and consequently, because there are no men around, the women have to work to provide for themselves and their families. The entire scheme is a psychological masterpiece because traditionally, the African American community is against the LGBTQ community, thus to have Black women joining the cause of homosexuality & transgendered in public, politically was a testament of the power of propaganda and the rift between Black Men & Women. In the absence of African American Men, Black women didn't stand a chance, especially because what they chose to do by free will, was psychologically implanted. Furthermore, Outside hegemonies plan to push African American women to the extent of their free will through feminist ideology, which has become more of a pseudo-religion.

                                             Black Enterprise: Black Women Truckers 2019

 Instead of taking care of the family and providing the most nurturing environment for her husband and children, like the other races of women understand as their gender role, the Black American Woman will fight to work in any capacity, thinking this is right and castrating any opposition to her right. Furthermore, not only are Black Men the majority prison population in various states, the women have to find the means to support their families. Meanwhile, her husband and children will be devoid of an environment of love and support, similar to the slave caricature of Mamie. In fact, the lack of historical knowledge has lead the Black American Woman back to the role of Mamie for all of America's Industries and the world to see. All this can be extracted from the current American propaganda machine. Last, ask yourself what type of television or films do Black African American Men have the most prominent roles? Drugs, Sports, & War films. These are the images the Outside Hegemony has given the African American Male to envision himself. These are the psychological implants, which will lead these men by free will straight to prison, hospitals, or a coffin. Thus, setting the narrative for the African Americans is as important to the people as healthcare.

Source:

Propaganda Photo: Vox Ukraine; 8/5/22 

Transgendered Classrooms; Gender Spectrum

Gender Neutral Preschool; CNN 2017

US Appeals Court Uphold's Florida Bann on Transgendered Bathroom Bann; Reuters 12/22/2023

Mass Incarceration: NPR 2019

Sodium Fire: Why The Struggle for African Self Determination is Obsolete

                                                             Photo Sodium Fire of 2016 Asia

"A sodium fire is a commercial fire of the liquid metal sodium. It can be sparked by the presence of air and cannot be quenched by water, which acts to fuel additional combustion. Even, the fire extinguisher will intensify the fire. The only solution to such a catastrophic tragedy is dry sand. Politically, socially, economically, societally, militarily, and intellectually, the African is in a sodium fire. The only solution is dry sand."

The contemporary age is full of wonder and awe. To be born in such an age is a gift, or a intelligently designed, curse, the product of thousands of years of human technological socio-evolution. Today, is the moment where the once impossible, is possible. Technology has even outpaced social governance like democracy, which is entirely insufficient to keep pace with emerging advances in commercial scientific organization. If threaten, a society would flatten for technological progress, even Nature, the creator, holder, teacher, and preserver of technology. Ironically, given the inability of any intelligent being or species, to holistically comprehend the infinite possibilities & infinite mathematical realities, Nature is often the first victim of progress. It is the thin line between knowledge and evil. For the thin line, in reference to the African Man, and his struggle for self determination, the time for peaceful compromise is over. Marginalized groups can never reclaim the ground lost by thousands of years of their Ancestral cultural socio-evolution, or push forward constructive agendas to cause the technological retreat of the post modern society. A successful marginalized group is rare and must affix themselves with aspects of the technological age, which ensures their indispensibility. Why?

The apparatus of technology has created global monolithic gigantrian systems of economies, which no small group has the power to oppose. All the simple substances of the modern and post modern society are the products of giant systems, for example coffee, sugar, tea, gold, aluminium, glass, Big Oil or even, electricity. All these systems include years of scientific processes, research, and physical organization on a massive scale using land resources in Asia, Africa or Australia, transportation vessels, refineries & factories in highly industrialized locations, distribution channels, legal structures in corporations, illegible courthouses, complex currency systems in a multi-component, highly complex globally organized apparatus monitored & protected by military units under the command of the owners of the regimes, their families, and their civilization hegemonies. Complex products like televisions, computers, and cellphones are built on the simple industries and are evolutions of decades to centuries of thought. The Architects, Physicians, and Engineers of today, with their foundations in classical studies and manufactured thought, are the most intelligent "Jack of All Trades," or Beings, in the history of mankind. The civilization that rests on top of this behemoth structure will rule the Earth.

The African movement for self determination is obsolete because it fails to weigh the sheer weight of technological advances, which increasingly depend on their labor, intelligence, ancestral lands, and its physical resources. The contemporary age is composed of behemoth systems of technology, represented by corporations and protected by laws, all of which are designed to provide simple and complex products consumed by every culture in the world. The self determination of the African, at this junction in the 21st Century, would jeopardize and even halt the entire world's technological advances, in every system, industry, and economy. Why else has the numerous attempts at African liberation in the Americas, the continent of Africa, and all over the world, not been ultimately successful? African American Slave rebellions like those of Nat Turner in 1830s Virginia, did not understand that their struggle was not just against the ordinary White American Enslaver and the plantation system, but against the Behemoth Tobacco Industry, Rice Industry, Coffee, Industry, Tea Industry, Sugar Industry, Cotton Industry, Christianity, and all the Capitalist components of the American Empire, which had components locally and abroad making plantations, haciendas, and encomiendas, possible. Haiti's Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines were closer to the solution for African liberation in 1804, by challenging the owners of the entire system, the French Empire, and they succeeded in overthrowing and releasing the shackles of political, social, and intellectual enslavement. Haiti, even assisted their neighbors to the South on overthrowing the owners of the Spanish Empire in South America. Together these Empires of Europe, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands were members of the European civilization and it is this civilization, that punished the Haitian revolutionaries with their last component of power in the physical corporation apparatus of ships, goods & products, distribution lines, laws, treaties & currency, which ultimately crushed the success of the liberation of Haiti. One needs friends and money to sustain a civilization and the liberation of the African continent, one century later in the 1960s, will also suffer from the same strategy. No one group, nation, or people can defeat all the component features of a Civilization. And because the Africans will not assemble themselves together, by physical resources, shipping systems, currencies and laws in civilization, as in times past, when the continent was not known as Africa, a province of Rome, but Khemet (Black land), Axum, or Abyssiania, under the 12 tribes, using all the component features of their intelligent industries, lands, resources, currencies, laws, and people for the aim of defense and Khemetian Civilization, their individual struggles is obsolete. I compare the current global situation of the African to a sodium fire because mere compromise, the solution water of shaking hands and legal treaties is long past. We are in an age where technology depends on our ignorance and so, water, air, and special means cannot quench the fire which has encompassed around us. 

The European Civilization is not willing to risk the natural evolution of their Capitalist culture, nor is the Asian Civilization willing to curb their natural Social program, for the Khemetian to catch up with the times. And even if, the more humane Asian culture, were willing, the European Apparatus has built their entire wealth structure on the labor, intelligence, and now, land resources of Africa. Such a generous gesture of "humanity," would cause their migration to a secondary or tertiary civilization. And since, when the Khemetian Civilization was at the head of the Earth, it neither ceased to invade Europe and Asia, except for the exchange of knowledge and mathematics, the full ferocity and righteous violence of superiority requires all the components of the full force for the acknowledgement and title of Civilization. Thus, the only way forward for the self determination for Africans (Khemetians), is direct competition and the mathematics of alternative technological progress, alternative education, alternative currency, economies , and bankings, alternative medicine, alternative diet, etcetera. The African or Khemetian, must outflank the European, just as the European outflanked the African during the Crusades. Excuse me, the historical rebranding is the European Age of Exploration. The African must minimize liberty from individual freedom to a gradual familial compromise and a negotiable tribal halt, such as the Asian Civilization successfully did, during the final decades of the 20th Century. 

Why fight progress when either by leadership or enslavement, we will be brought to the same zenith of human perfection in technological advances. So, we must create new alternative behemoth systems and industries for human technology and solve our socioeconomic tragedy by commanding our families to move forward together, forbid individualism & sexism strategies which destroy family, and jettison any detrimental system or industry set on blocking our progress into the technological future. I believe in Afrofuturism, and I believe that the 22nd Century is the beginning of a millennium of African Civilization, but it is a future that aligns us with mathematics and nature, and leaves behind all of the ignorance, demonic vices, & trauma of the Arab & European Slave trade, Holy Wars, and it is a era where we are not as a second caste, or servant of another race of Men. The only solution to a sodium fire is dry sand and fixed structures of Earth. The only solution is Nature. Our own human nature is our only solution.

January Movie of the Month: Rosewood (1997)

 

Rosewood directed by John Singleton; Warner Bros 1997

This January 2023 marks the 100th Centennial of The Rosewood Massacre. In memorial of the next two week's events sponsored by The University of Florida and The Southern Poverty Law Center. As a Gainesville, Florida native, this event is historical for my community. Please show your support for our memorial.

Rosewood Survivor Interviews

Director John Singleton Interview 

Voices of Civil Rights 

The Summers of 1917-1923 in the United States, marked a very turbulent time in racial relations. African Americans were seeking permanant settlements across the country and this was a direct challenge to the White American Status quo, where land ownership remained under White control and labor was the only alternative for African descendants. From race riots in Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, New York City, to massacres in Greenwood, Ocoee, and Rosewood, violence and lynchings became the American experience for African Americans across the country. Lynching became an American passtime, especially on July 4th, where White Communities across the South & North would gather together for a lynching to celebrate American Independence Day. The American Horror story of being Black in America, effectively, creating two Americas, one for the Whites, and another filled with fear for the Black Africans. Thus, Black Floridians must not forget the long history of this struggle for land ownership in this state, which goes back prior to the massacres of the 1920s, but to the Black cities of Angola, Fort Mose, Minatti, Pilaklikaha, and Tobasa. The struggle for Black African self determination in Florida has been fought for a long time. However, in this article, we will remain in commemoration of those who lost their lives 100 years ago, across the state of Florida.

The Ocoee Massacre

Outside of Florida: St Louis Massacre, Greenwood Massacre

St. Louis Massacre

Greenwood Massacre

Sources:

1. Rosewood; Warner Bros Entertainment 1997

2. 100th Commemoration Celebration; Univ. of Florida, Southern Poverty Law Center, Holland & Knight, City of Gainesville, Florida: January 8-14, 2023

3.60 Minutes- Rosewood Survivor Interview & Greenwood Massacre

4. Director John Singleton Interview on Rosewood; Television Academy Foundation 2017

5. Voices of Civil Rights: Rosewood

6. Ocoee Massacre; Eyewitness News 9 2011

7. The Purge: St. Louis Massacre; Hezakya News (distributor)

8. Six Black Free Towns; Jaxsons & WJCT 2023