Lasca Sartoris

Source: Imani D. Owens - Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (2023: 134)

Ethel Ennis, 1964.

Fan attending a Grace Jones concert at the Les Mouches club in New York, 1977. Photographed by Nick Machalaba.

R.I.P to the first well known black model, Helen Williams, who passed away on July 26, 2023. Her obituary was just recently published in the NY Times on November 2. Helen was the most photographed, and highest paid, Black model of her era.

Aretha Franklin photographed by Jerry Schatzberg, 1967

Images by Vron Ware

”The most significant date in the history of the black experience in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century is the year 1981. It began inauspiciously in the early hours of 18 January with a racist arson attack on a sixteenth birthday part in south-east London, which resulted in the deaths of thirteen young black people and twenty-six revellers suffering serious injuries. The response of the police, aided and abetted by sections of the media, with the implicit approval of the government, was to use their power to deny justice to the survivors of the fire, the bereaved and the dead. The shock, sorrow and outrage felt by black people throughout the country found expression in concrete political action. On 2nd March, some six weeks after the fire, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, chaired by the late John La Rose, mobilised 20,000 people for a march through the streets of London. That Black People’s Day of Action was an unprecedented demonstration of black political power. It was a wake up call for the authorities, a  watershed moment that signalled a paradigm shift in race relations in the UK. Moreover, with the Day of Action came a leap in Black British consciousness of the power to bring about change.” - Linton Kwesi Johnson; The New Cross Massacre Story

Peter Basch photograph of burlesque dancer Rose Hardaway - 1957

In Memoriam ~ 2018 Denise LaSalle: July 16, 1939-January 8, 2018 Olivia Cole: November 26, 1942-January 19, 2018 Wakako Yamauchi: October 24, 1924-August 16, 2018 Aretha Franklin: March 25, 1942-August 16, 2018 Nancy Wilson: February 20, 1937-December 13, 2018 Raven Wilkinson: February 2, 1935-December 17, 2018 Sono Osato: August 29, 1919-December 26, 2018

Alexander Pushkin !! The man considered the father of Russian literature was he great-grandson of an Ethiopian prince named Ibrahim Gannibal. Among Pushkin’s more famous unpublished works (left after his death in a duel) is an unfinished novel about his Ethiopian great-grandfather.

Portrait of a young Syrian woman with a cigarette. Circa 1940s, 50s

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius free ebook

reading “Negros in Film” by Peter Noble (1948)