dynopop reblogged
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
— Audre Lorde (via dynopop)
"The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. The most-assigned living authors were Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth."
-Rachel Donadio, "Revisiting the Canon Wars" (2007)
An African-American family leaves Florida for the North during the Great Depression.
Black orphaned children and juvenile offenders could be bought to serve as laborers for white planters in many Southern states from 1865 until the 1940s.
Lighting Hopkins, "Tim Moore's Farm"
Yeah, you know it ain't but the one thing, you know This black man done was wrong Yeah, you know it ain't but the one thing, you know This black man done was wrong Yes, you know I moved my wife and family down On Mr.Tim Moore's farm
Yeah, you know Mr.Tim Moore's a man He don't never stand and grin He just said, "Keep out of the graveyard, I'll save you from the pen" You know, soon in the morning, he'll give you scrambled eggs Yes, but he's liable to call you so soon You'll catch a mule by his hind legs
The White Eagle in Port Allen, LA.
The postcard above shows the crowd at the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, in 1893.
On April 27, 1899, a white mob in Lee County, Georgia, lynched a Black man named Mitchell Daniel for “talking too much” about the brutal lynching of Sam Hose, another Black man, that had taken place days earlier.
