13478: Last-Minute Xmas Shopping.

Sexy Christmas Girl vector art for as little as $6 per limited use.

Christmas card signed by Malcolm X for just $6000.

Limited edition Noelle doll and other holiday treats at All Things Golliwog.

And enjoy Christmas breakfast with holiday pancakes from Aunt Jemima!

12528: BHM 2015—Malcolm X.

The New York Daily News remembers Malcolm X 50 years after his assassination.

Remembering civil rights giant Malcolm X 50 years after his assassination

The controversial activist, who inspired many and infuriated others, was gunned down Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights

By Rich Schapiro | NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Harlem was ready to explode.

It was just before midnight on April 26, 1957, and at least 4,000 protesters were massed outside the 28th Precinct stationhouse on Eighth Ave.

Hours earlier, 32-year-old Johnson Hinton and two friends had been walking along W. 125th St. when they spotted two cops beating another black man with nightsticks.

“You’re not in Alabama!” yelled Hinton and his pals. “This is New York!”

The officers turned their nightsticks on Hinton, a member of the Nation of Islam, delivering several crushing blows to his head and face.

Hinton, despite suffering lacerations on his scalp and bleeding on the brain, was now being held inside the four-story, red-brick 28th Precinct police station.

The crowd was growing impatient. A race riot seemed imminent.

A ripple of excitement swept through the crush of people when a 6-foot-3 man in a black suit and spectacles showed up and strode inside the stationhouse. The demonstrators, many of whom were Nation of Islam members, knew exactly who he was.

Malcolm X.

The fiery head of the Nation’s new Harlem mosque, Malcolm was allowed to see Hinton. But the cops refused to return the battered man to the hospital.

Malcolm, sensing an impasse, stepped outside the stationhouse and flashed a hand signal to his Nation of Islam followers. They immediately started marching off — silent and stern — like an Army battalion having just received orders from their general.

The rest of the crowd followed.

A group of NYPD cops watched the scene in awe.

“No one man should have that much power,” one officer told Amsterdam News editor James Hicks.

Hinton was released in the morning — after the Nation paid his $2,500 bail — and taken to Harlem Hospital.

The striking show of force introduced the nation to Malcolm X.

Incendiary, influential and often polarizing, Malcolm led the black nationalist movement with a clenched fist and biting tongue.

His rejection of integration and insistence on black liberation “by any means necessary” made him a hero to large swaths of black people.

To many others, he was seen as a villain and a menace. The militant, anti-establishment rhetoric Malcolm preached sent shivers of fear down the spines of many whites and alarmed some African-Americans.

“Other black leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King included, all engaged in tailoring their language to minimize negative reactions from white America,” said Russell Adams, professor emeritus of African-American studies at Howard University. “Malcolm said in his fashion what many blacks thought and said among themselves.”

Fifty years after his assassination, Malcolm X remains one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century.

Read the full story.

10211: Matthew Weiner On U.S. History.

Vulture published a short interview with AMC series Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, probing his thoughts on the integration of secretary Dawn Chambers and the Civil Rights Era. Weiner displayed his cluelessness on a couple of levels. “I feel like the expectation that introducing a black character means you have to tell the civil rights struggle is in a way racist,” Weiner said. Um, are viewers really expecting Mad Men to spotlight the civil rights movement? If the program remains true to its cultural accuracy, the staff at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce will not even notice the revolution. Audience members would probably be fine if Weiner simply developed a minority character versus having them serve as token props. Hell, Weiner’s talent-challenged son gets more screen time than Draper’s administrative assistant. “All I can say is, it’s early. We have 26 episodes left. I don’t feel like in the history of the United States that 1966 was the year of civil rights; it’s early,” Weiner added. Um, Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus—as well as the Montgomery Bus Boycott—took place in 1955. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I Have a Dream” in 1963, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. And MLK was shot in 1968. Sure, 1966 might not be “the year of civil rights,” but it’s certainly within the general timeframe.

Why Mad Men Hasn’t Dealt Much With Civil Rights

By Kyle Buchanan

If you were expecting Mad Men to devote more time to the civil rights movement after the salvo of season-opening episodes that introduced black secretary Dawn (played by Teyonnah Paris), creator Matt Weiner would like you to keep those assumptions in check. “I feel like the expectation that introducing a black character means you have to tell the civil rights struggle is in a way racist,” Weiner tells the Los Angeles Times. “I use her character the same way I use all the characters on the show. She is there. I’m sorry if people were disappointed. Do I regret there wasn’t more of it? Yeah. All I can say is, it’s early. We have 26 episodes left. I don’t feel like in the history of the United States that 1966 was the year of civil rights; it’s early.”

As for all that talk about the anachronistically high divorce rate on Mad Men? Well, there’s at least one married couple Weiner says he doesn’t plan on breaking up: Don and his recent bride, Megan. “People should assume like Don does that he will be married to this woman for the rest of his life,” says Weiner. “This is not one in a series of marriages for Don. This is the good marriage after the bad one. Of course, he’s part of his time, though. Can he really deal with an independent person?”

9766: Job Hunting By Any Means Necessary.

This actual job listing seeks a “Freelance Copywriter who can write like Malcolm X speaks.” However, the chances of landing the job significantly decrease if you’re Black and Muslim.

Freelance Copywriter who can write like Malcolm X speaks

Description:
This agency-client is seeking a freelance copywriter to help craft copy for an established US food brand that is a visionary activist empowering people who are passionate about health and well-being in the world to establish independence from the oppressive food system

The brand voice reference is Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT1jLY20tLo

If you can write powerful, snappy, copy that incites, is not afraid to be controversial, polarizing and poetic, and have a deep understanding of sustainability, and can write about food and make it sound radical and delicious at the same time, you're our copywriter.

Our agency-client builds leading brands for values-based companies in the natural products industry. They identify potential through research and analysis, and realize that potential through groundbreaking strategy and powerfully authentic creative.

Type of writer needed:
Bold
Pithy
Provocative
Poetic
Radical
Deeply understands sustainability
Can make food sexy and delicious

You can be based Anywhere for this job.

How to apply
If you are the person for the job, please submit the form at the Apply link on the Wordfruit site and send a separate application to Richard at Wordfruit to express an interest in this specific job.

Thanks.

Please apply online at:
http://wordfruit.com/apply

9761: Malcolm X Rediscovered.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Student rediscovers lost Malcolm X speech

By David Klepper

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America’s top diplomats.

The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

“No one had listened to this in 50 years,” Burnley told the Associated Press. “There aren’t many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech — it’s not like others he had given before.”

In the May 11, 1961, speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.

At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam, now based in Chicago. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.

The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, “has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.”

The rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women’s college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper’s editor, Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke would become a leading American diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany soon after that nation’s reunification, ambassador to the United Nations and President Barack Obama’s special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at age 69.

But in 1961, Holbrooke, 20, was eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations — an unusual interest on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students.

Pierce’s article ran in the newspaper’s magazine and made her the first woman whose name was featured on the newspaper’s masthead.

Somehow, the article made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance.

Tickets — going for 50 cents apiece — for the Brown speech sold quickly. About 800 people filled the venue meant for 500.

8864: X-Men Puts The X In Blaxploitation…?

Spoiler Alert! If you have not yet seen the latest X-Men movie, you might want to skip this post.

X-Men: First Class draws inspiration from the popular Marvel Comics characters, as well as iconic heroes from Black History. Others have already noted the connections—and one reviewer saw parallels to gay rights too—so MultiCultClassics will forgo rehashing the observations.

The most heavy-handed Black references went to a Black character, Darwin, played by Edi Gathegi. Darwin’s mutant abilities included “adapting” to any situation. He was a “survivor” whose pre-superhero job was serving as a streetwise cab driver. Alas, Darwin became the first lead teammate to get assassinated when the evil Shaw force-fed him a handful of explosive energy. Oh, and the other Black character—Angel, played by Zoë Kravitz—originally worked as a dancer at a strip club.

So in the end, X-Men: First Class blends Black History and Blaxploitation, making it a sure-fire summer Blackbuster.

8130: I Have A Dream Car.

Mercedes-Benz used Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to hype vehicles. And Volkswagen did likewise. WTF, it’s not even Black History Month yet. Plus, the brands and advertising agencies responsible for the work are hardly supporters of the Civil Rights leader’s iconic dream, at least based on their diversity records. What’s next? Malcolm X for BMW X Series? Rosa Parks for Honda SUVs?

7877: Mad Men Mention.

The fourth episode of AMC series Mad Men presented a handful of cultural cues:

• Pete Campbell and Harry Crane were discussing a Playtex newspaper ad that caused unhappiness with the client. Apparently, a mistake in the printing process made the model look dark-skinned—like a Puerto Rican. Campbell remarked, “…Puerto Rican girls buy brassieres.” Crane countered by lusting after the nipples of a Puerto Rican woman he had seen on the subway.

• Ken Cosgrove had lunch with Pete Campbell and made a politically-incorrect statement about the “retarded” people working at McCann.

• Peggy Olson went to an artist’s party with Blacks in attendance.

• Later, Peggy Olson and her art director partner were making small talk when she blurted, “Did you know Malcolm X was shot last Sunday?” The art director shrugged a reply and Olson probed, “Did you know who he was?” Um, does anyone associated with this program know who he was?

7585: X Killer, Ex-Convict.

From The New York Times…

Killer of Malcolm X Is Granted Parole

By Andy Newman and John Eligon

After being turned down for parole 16 times, Malcolm X’s only confessed assassin is about to gain his freedom.

Thomas Hagan has been held since moments after shots rang out in the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. He has been on work release for more than two decades, but he still spends two days a week locked up at the Lincoln Correctional Facility on West 110th Street in Manhattan.

On March 3, however, on his 17th try, Mr. Hagan was granted parole, the State Division of Parole said. His final release date is tentatively scheduled for April 28. The news was reported Thursday on The Village Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog.

Mr. Hagan, who turned 69 in jail on Tuesday, was a militant member of the Nation of Islam on Feb. 21, 1965, when Malcolm X was shot while giving a speech at the Audubon, in Washington Heights. Mr. Hagan, then known as Talmadge X. Hayer, was captured by the crowd and shot at and beaten before being rescued by the police.

Two other men, Muhammad Abdul Aziz (then known as Norman 3X Butler) and Kahlil Islam (then Thomas 15X Johnson), were also charged with the murder. They maintained their innocence. Mr. Hagan did not, testifying at his trial in 1966 that he was responsible for the murder and that his co-defendants were innocent.

All three men were sentenced to 20 years to life.

Mr. Hagan said in a 1977 affidavit that he and several accomplices (not Mr. Aziz or Mr. Islam) decided to kill Malcolm X because he was a “hypocrite” who had “gone against the leader of the Nation of Islam,” Elijah Muhammad. Mr. Hagan said that after one man shot Malcolm X in the chest with a shotgun, he and another man fired several more rounds at him.

Mr. Aziz was paroled in 1985, and in 1998 was named by Louis Farrakhan to be chief of security for the Harlem mosque that Malcolm X once headed. Mr. Islam was paroled in 1987.

Mr. Hagan, who earned a master’s degree while in prison, according to a 2008 profile in The New York Post, was placed on work release in 1988. In 2008, he was spending his free days with his wife and children in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and working in a fast food restaurant.

“I’ve been incarcerated for 40 years, and I’ve had a good record all around,” he told The Post. “I don’t see any reason for holding me.”

7392: Percy Sutton (1920-2009).

From The Associated Press…

Percy Sutton, attorney for Malcolm X, dies at 89

By Cristian Salazar, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – Percy Sutton, the pioneering civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X before launching successful careers as a political power broker and media mogul, has died. He was 89.

Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment Saturday when reached by phone at her New York City home.

The son of a former slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist’s family for decades.

The consummate politician, Sutton served in the New York State Assembly before taking over as Manhattan borough president in 1966, becoming the highest-ranking black elected official in the state.

Sutton also mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate and mayor of New York, and served as political mentor for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential races.

Jackson recalled Sutton talking about electing a black president as early as 1972. Sutton was influential in getting his 1984 campaign going, he said.

“He never stopped building bridges and laying the groundwork,” Jackson said Sunday. “We are very glad to be the beneficiaries of his work.”

In a statement released Saturday night, Gov. David Paterson called Sutton a mentor and “one of New York’s and this nation’s most influential African-American leaders.”

“Percy was fiercely loyal, compassionate and a truly kind soul,” Paterson said. “He will be missed but his legacy lives on through the next generations of African-Americans he inspired to pursue and fulfill their own dreams and ambitions.”

President Barack Obama called Sutton “a true hero” to African-Americans across the country.

“His life-long dedication to the fight for civil rights and his career as an entrepreneur and public servant made the rise of countless young African-Americans possible,” Obama said in a statement.

In 1971, with his brother Oliver, Sutton purchased WLIB-AM, making it the first black-owned radio station in New York City. His Inner City Broadcasting Corp. eventually picked up WBLS-FM, which reigned for years as New York’s top-rated radio station, before buying stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and San Antonio between 1978-85.

The Texas purchase marked a homecoming for the suave and sophisticated Sutton, born in San Antonio on Nov. 24, 1920, the youngest of 15 children.

Among Sutton’s other endeavors was his purchase and renovation of the famed Apollo Theater when the Harlem landmark’s demise appeared imminent.

“The Apollo and its staff stand on the shoulders of Mr. Sutton as the theater continues to flourish,” said Jonelle Procope, president and CEO of Apollo Theater Foundation Inc. “(He) will be greatly missed and will always be an integral part of the Apollo legacy.”

Sutton’s father, Samuel, was born into slavery just before the Civil War. The elder Sutton became principal at a segregated San Antonio high school, and he made education a family priority: All 12 of his surviving children attended college.

When he was 13, Percy Sutton endured a traumatic experience that drove him inexorably into the fight for racial equality. A police officer approached Sutton as the teen handed out NAACP pamphlets. “N-----, what are you doing out of your neighborhood?” he asked before beating the youth.

When World War II arrived, Sutton’s enlistment attempts were rebuffed by Southern white recruiters. The young man went to New York, where he was accepted and joined the Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, Sutton earned a law degree in New York while working as a post office clerk and a subway conductor. He served again as an Air Force intelligence officer during the Korean War before returning to Harlem in 1953 and establishing his law office with brother Oliver and a third partner, George Covington.

In addition to representing Malcolm X for a decade until his 1965 assassination, the Sutton firm handled the cases of more than 200 defendants arrested in the South during the 1963-64 civil rights marches. Sutton was also elected to two terms as president of the New York office of the NAACP.

After Malcolm’s assassination, Sutton worked as lawyer for Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz. He represented her grandson, 12-year-old Malcolm Shabazz, when the youth was accused of setting a 1997 fire that caused her death.

Sutton was elected to the state Legislature in 1965, and quickly emerged as spokesman for its 13 black members. His charisma and eloquence led to his selection as Manhattan borough president in 1966, completing the term of Constance Baker Motley, who was appointed federal judge.

Two years later, Sutton announced a run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jacob Javits, although he pulled out of the Democratic primary to back Paul O’Dwyer.

Sutton remained in his Manhattan job through 1977, the same year he launched a doomed campaign for mayor that ended with Edward I. Koch defeating six competitors for the Democratic nomination.

Sutton was among the first voices raised against the Vietnam War, surrendering his delegate’s seat at the 1968 Democratic convention in protest and supporting anti-war candidate George McGovern four years later against incumbent President Richard Nixon.

In addition to his radio holdings, Sutton also headed a group that owned The Amsterdam News, the second largest black weekly newspaper in the country. The paper was later sold.

Sutton’s devotion to Harlem and its people was rarely more evident than when he spent $250,000 to purchase the shuttered Apollo Theater in 1981. The Apollo turned 70 in 2004, a milestone that was unthinkable until Sutton stepped in to save the landmark.

Sutton “retired” in 1991, but his work as an adviser, mentor and confidante to politicians and businessmen never abated. He was among a group of American businessmen selected during the Clinton administration to attend meetings with the Group of Seven (G-7) Nations in 1995-96.

“He was a great man,” said Charles Warfield Jr., the president and chief operating officer of ICBC Broadcast Holdings Inc., when reached early Sunday. He declined to comment further out of respect for the wishes of Sutton’s family.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he last visited Sutton in a nursing home Wednesday. He recalled meeting Sutton for the first time at age 12; Four years later, Sutton paid for his trip to a national black political convention because the teenage Sharpton couldn’t afford to go.

“He personified the black experience of the 20th century,” Sharpton said. “He started the century where blacks were victims. We ended as victors.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Sunday that flags on city buildings would be lowered in Sutton’s honor.

Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and M.L. Johnson in Chicago contributed to this report.