I define myself, we define ourselves.

Habari Gani,

It's my 41st celebration of Kwanzaa. My parents began celebrating our celebration in their church in 1970 in Brooklyn New York. As a child I knew nothing different. We celebrated with some Jewish friends during Channukah, we celebrated the birth of The Christ on December 25th and my father, Rev. Dr. Samuel Varner schooled' me early on that this was the day that most Christians celebrated his birth as it was set by early church leaders, but not the actual date of The Christ's birth. We looked at it as we did with our birthdays, while the date of birth may occur on a Thursday, we would celebrate it on Saturday. Then on December 26th we began celebrating the African aspect of the Americas. On New Years eve we had a Night Watch service to bring in the New Year worshiping before we went partying.

While in grade school I learned that Kwanzaa was a very niche celebration and I never expected all people of African descent to celebrate it. It was very underground. I truly enjoyed the festivities and congregagtion as we celebrated in New York and also in Columbus Ohio where the community was very vibrant in it's celebration. My dad and mom were frequently interviewed and I remember a number of debates over the celebration. While in Columbus my parents invited Maluna Ron Karenga to our racially mixed church and he spoke of Kwanzaa and the other activities the US organization was involved in. While he noted that Kwanzaa wasn't associated with any particular belief system, he reveled in meeting numerous Pastors who began adding elements of the celebration into their winter church activities. I fondly remember a public debate set-up by a major Black church in Columbus Ohio which pitted my father against the church's pastor on the topic "Should a Christian celebrate Kwanzaa ?" The moderator opened with "Kwanzaa or Christmas Dr. Varner ?" My father replied "Both. The more important celebration is one's personal walk and relationship with our Savior. That's something to celebrate. Then as you celebrate other great things in your life such as the 4th of July, your birthday, or a graduation add Jesus to your invitation list. It will make the celebration sweeter." He then gave a history lesson on Christmas and how the early Christian church debated and even outlawed the celebration at times. He ended by saying "I'm proud of my African heritage and I celebrate that, and I of course invite my Lord and Savior into all of my celebrations." The debating pastor then took the mike and said "Well then. It looks like there isn't anything to debate. Praise the Lord Church." We then went early into the social hall and fellowshipped together.

We never really discussed with my classmates our celebration of Kwanzaa. It was a special event that was shared amongst the like-minded. I revel in the performances of Tony West and Imani Dancers in the late 70s and early 80s. We gathered, we interacted, we broke bread, and then we partied. I persoanally loved meeting and flirting with the girls and listening to the DJs play this new Rap music along side Disco, Soul, and Oldies. There were no fights, no problems, and lots of supervising eyes.

In College in the late 80s I shared with anyone I saw who seemed to be a celebrant that I too celebrated, yet remained silent to anyone else. I learned that anyone who seemed to publically embrace Kwanzaa or seemed interested in other African centered information was labeled as a radical, a White-hater, and UnAmerican. I always found it interesting that my ancestry which included Irish, Indian, and African had all received difficulty in their interactions in America. To wear a badege that said "Kiss Me...I'm Irish" was cool, but to wear a badge which displayed the Red, Black, and Green colors would bring difficulty and discomfort.

In the 1990s I then began encountering people who demeaned the celebration by making sure I knew that "Karenga was a racist, a communist lover, was anti-American, and was abusive towards women." To them any association with Kwanzaa was foolish and perhaps even anti-Christian. The interesting aspect of these conversations was that they were normally initiated by other Blacks or people of African descent. Here in Hampton Roads Virginia things were even different in the Kwanzaa attendants. In Columbus Black Americans, Caribbean and Hispanic Blacks, and Blacks from Africa all came together for these celebrations. In Hampton Roads only a few native Africans participated, and the Caribbean/Latino community seemed unintrested at best.

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The Color of Cola - Black History & Pepsi Cola

The Color of Cola

By WARREN GOLDSTEIN

Published: February 4, 2007

History-making heroism, Stephanie Capparell means to demonstrate in this admiring account of the Pepsi-Cola Company’s pioneering — but largely unsung — “special-markets sales staff,” ought not to be measured solely by the fame it attracts. She’s right. Inconceivable without the giants of the ballpark and the ring, demonstrations and courtrooms, the movement for African-American civil rights depended even more on the mostly unknowable actions of millions, black and white, who created new ways of thinking and working and acting within and across racial lines.

Boyd Collection/From “The Real Pepsi Challenge”

The model for the young boy in this store display from the 1940s was Ron Brown, who became President Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary.

THE REAL PEPSI CHALLENGE

The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business.

By Stephanie Capparell.

Illustrated. 349 pp. Wall Street Journal Books/Free Press. $25. 

“The Real Pepsi Challenge” begins with a creative, dynamic white New York businessman, a politically connected, progressive Republican turnaround specialist named Walter S. Mack Jr., who took over Pepsi in 1938. Mack, in his own words “an unrepentant capitalist and a liberal” who enjoyed playing, as Capparell puts it, “scrappy David to the Goliath that was Coca-Cola” (Pepsi’s 1939 sales were under $5 million, compared with Coca-Cola’s $128 million), decided to strengthen Pepsi’s hold on the “Negro market.” Pepsi’s 12-ounce bottle, twice the size of a Coke, sold for the same nickel, which made it more popular among poorer people; according to Capparell, Pepsi had “survived the Depression by appealing to Negro consumers.”
Mack more or less invented the business internship in 1940, with a nationwide essay contest for college graduates. Two of the 13 winners were black; they traveled through 21 states and “thousands of miles by car, train and bus, selling Pepsi” and, by implication, Pepsi’s commitment to African-Americans. World War II interrupted the program, though not Walter Mack’s racial activism: Pepsi opened three integrated military canteens that served 29 million servicemen during and after the war, while “the government’s canteens — like the Army itself — were segregated.”
Capparell deftly portrays the optimism of the immediate postwar years, especially regarding what she calls the “dizzying number of firsts for African-Americans” — in business, education, politics, entertainment and, of course, baseball — in the banner year of 1947. That year Mack hired the 33-year-old Edward F. Boyd, a National Urban League staff member working on housing issues, with a promise that Boyd could hire a dozen African-American salesmen. A slump in the soft-drink market kept Boyd to just four hires at first; his staff grew to eight in 1950, and finally reached 12 a year later. The book mostly recounts the story of Boyd’s special-markets team — the employees’ backgrounds, how they sold the cola, the coverage they received in the black press — and Pepsi’s shifting fortunes in an often volatile market.
The “real Pepsi challenge” of the title lay in the efforts of Pepsi’s black salesmen in the 1940s and ’50s to establish both the importance and profitability of the “Negro market” and the reliability and competence of the men who could sell to it. These men faced the gritty, humiliating realities of Jim Crow as they traveled through the South hustling their cola at black churches, social clubs, schools and athletic events. Some of the first African-Americans working in national corporations — who didn’t carry a broom, that is — they became role models and minor celebrities.
With Mack’s backing, Boyd ran remarkable advertising campaigns in 1948, 1949 and 1951 in the black press. Called “Leaders in Their Fields,” the ads featured profiles of African-American professionals like the diplomat Ralph Bunche, the composer Walter Franklin Anderson, the journalist P. Bernard Young Jr. and the hat designer Mildred Blount. Capparell shows how the series, copies of which black schools and universities requested as educational materials, simultaneously pumped significant income into black publications, showcased black business and professional success, and helped cement black loyalty to Pepsi.
Without calling explicit attention to the alliance among black leaders, the black media and black businesses — an alliance that sprang into action when the president of the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company toasted Georgia’s segregationist governor in 1950, and helped inspire a Pepsi-supported boycott of Coke — Capparell establishes the importance of their mutual support in the overall struggle against racial discrimination. Just as black sportswriters played a key role as advocates for baseball’s integration, the black press, by promoting black consumers and businesses, served to strengthen itself and increase collective black political power. In 1951, Coke placed its first ads in black papers.
Capparell, an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a co-author of “Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons From the Great Antarctic Explorer,” interviewed six surviving members of the team. Through them she opens a window onto the frequently impressive, culturally conservative (and therefore often deprecated), “striving” lives of the respectable black middle class in the years before integration — men and women without whom the achievements of the civil rights years would have been impossible.
Take the story of the team member Jean Emmons: from DuSable High School on the South Side of Chicago to a steel mill in Gary, Ind.; from a junior college to an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1948. Emmons received no serious business interviews until Pepsi hired him. He later earned a doctorate in education and retired in 1981 after six years as superintendent of public schools in Trenton, N.J.
More journalism than history, more inspiration than analysis, “The Real Pepsi Challenge” nevertheless deepens our appreciation not, as the author would have it, for the platitude “that diversity is good for business and that business should be good for diversity,” but for the persistence and courage of those willing to break barriers and risk the consequences.
Warren Goldstein, who teaches American history at the University of Hartford, is the author, most recently, of “William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/books/review/Goldstein.t.html
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Losing 19 - Judge Lynn Tolver

LOSING NINETEEN
B Y J U D G E L Y N N C . T O L E R

I lost Nineteen again today. Abandoning himself to that wasteland we offhandedly call ‘the system’, he just walked away - casually - like it was no big deal. Some claim I shouldn’t say I lost him, though, considering what I do. While I am a Black woman, I am also the person appointed to balance the books, which means, that, on this particular day, I am the one sending Nineteen to jail. I am a judge in an inner-ring suburb, a place where middle-class stability stands in the shadow of urban distractions. Here, Black, male and Nineteen is required to face the same dilemma every day; “Do I work and wait like momma said, or join the party down the street?” Forced to choose before the calm sets in, Nineteen picks the wrong one. Next thing you know, he’s standing before me, wondering what all the fuss is about.

It’s important to know that I am a municipal judge. Handling minor matters, I deal with assault, drug possession and carrying a concealed weapon charges. Unfortunately, the size of the cases I see occasionally confuses Nineteen. He views his mistake as a little thing that doesn’t warrant much concern. I, on the other hand, see it as a small down payment on an incredible cultural cost. “What’s with making me look for a job?” he asks. “Why do I have to go back to school in order to stay out of jail?” I’m fighting to keep the boy from becoming a statistic, and he doesn’t even care. So I plead, not for Nineteen to obey the law, but for him to do right by me. “You owe every Black woman who cares for you an obligation you won’t be able to repay if you’re working off some ill-gotten debt to a society you don’t owe,’ I tell him. Some listen. Most don’t. My successes are few; I decided to give up at least once a week. But I keep pressing because I don’t want to leave stranded the few I do manage to help. Those wins notwithstanding, my frustrations remain. Just yesterday, one asked me to stop bothering him. “You’re not my mother,” he said. “Why are you messing with me? Just let me do my time.” Lots of them, in fact, ask me to leave them alone. They tell me, “It ain’t no thing.” But, more often than not, the phrase that I hear is the chilling “I can jail.”

Of course, I know I only see the problems. Nineteen represents himself, well, in large numbers
everywhere. I have seven I claim outright, you know - not currently Nineteen - but Black and male. One I married; four came with him, and two I produced on my own. The older ones have already been Nineteen. They’ve had their troubles, but they’re all okay now. The ones I made myself, however, are still young; they have a lot to learn. Living well in a world that does not always see your clearly is a difficult thing to do. My boys must be able to ignore those who ridicule their efforts to do well in school while remaining strong even among those who find that strength intimidating. Tough lessons, these, but they must learn them if they are going to do Nineteen the right way. I don’t want them standing before some judge who may see them as
a statistic. If they mess around and get before the wrong guy, then where will they be? Jail, of course, is the answer to that question. The very same place that I wound up sending Nineteen
today. Frustrated because I can’t fix the world, and Nineteen won’t let me help him live better in it, I shake my head, but must move on. I have thirty more cases to hear.

“To jail or not to jail?” that is the question. How hard am I supposed to try without his help? Doesn’t he see how so much of the harm he causes lands right in some sister’s lap?
That is why I told Nineteen he owed me. “Consider the sisters in your life,” I say. “It isn’t always
about you”. Then I remind him that, whether or not he understands it, when you jail, we in jail too.

http://www.judgelynn.com/pdf/19losing.pdf

The video: http://youtu.be/zN8rXBNWnsg

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BLACK IMPROVEMENT !
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We got Books ! Positive Vibes Litterature 757-523-1399