Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m , along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: Both the AIDS epidemic and Covid-19 inflicted disproportionate deaths in the Black community. We’ll explore the reasons why. And, the second volume on a biography of the most important Black activist and intellectual that you may never have heard of, is about to published. Stay tuned to learn why you MUST know the name and works of Hubert Harrison.
But first – U.S. politicians have for generations gained power by scaring white people with threatening images Black males. President Trump is running on a platform that essentially mimics the old newspaper headline, “Black Buck Runs Amuk.” Douglas Flow is professor of History at Washington University, in St. Louis. He’s written a book, titled, “Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York.” “Uncontrollable Blackness” is a provocative title. Was it planned that way?
There’s nothing new about the high death toll Blacks are suffering from the Covid-19 contagion. Thirty years ago, the HIV-AIDS epidemic killed disproportionate numbers of Blacks. J.T. Roane is a Research Fellow at the Schomburg Research Center in Black Culture, in New York City. He wrote an article about AIDS and Black Philadelphia.
In the first quarter of the 20th century, an immigrant from the Virgin Islands named Hubert Harrison influenced a whole generation of Black activists, including Marcus Garvey, A. Phillip Randolph and the entire so-called “New Negro” movement. Activist and scholar Jeff Perry has spent more than a decade chronicling the life and works of Hubert Harrison, and will soon release the second volume of his biography, titled “Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality.”