Robin D.G. Kelley argues that Cedric Robinson’s book is “a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora.” Kelley goes on to suggest that Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism.” In fact, it was Robinson who proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Accordingly, such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. I have argued, elsewhere, rooting my perspectives in a critical reading of Robinson, Marimba Ani, Oliver Cox, Audrey Smedley, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James and W.E. B. Du Bois, that race must be understood at a deeper level. To better understand the salience of a fictitious, yet deadly concept, it must be examined as a cultural-ideological class construct, further building on the argument of Du Bois, that “the world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. According to Audrey Smedley in, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, race is a “cosmological ordering system structured out of the political, economic, and social experiences of peoples who emerged as expansionist, conquering, and dominating nations on a worldwide quest for wealth and power.” Being so, we can see that race is expressed in material and non-material ways. It is, in fact, a culturally ingrained, ideologically-driven mechanism that has permeated sociopolitical structures and economic imperatives which guide institutional practices for the expressed purpose to serve deeply rooted insecurities that are wrapped in the myths of white superiority. Today, we bring you, a public critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition with Acklyn Lynch, Haile Gerima and AWNP collective’s member, Josh Myers. This critical reading is part of a series that is curated at Sankofa Video and Books in Washington, DC. Dr. Acklyn Lynch is a revered scholar/activist of African and African Diaspora history, culture and politics. He has taught at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Howard University, and University of Massachusetts Amhurst. He is author of Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance. Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa in (1993). His films have won numerous awards and are internationally acclaimed for the range and scope of their storytelling, cinematography, and innovations. Gerima continues to produce and distribute his films, including his most recent award-winning film, Teza (2008). He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally. Josh Myers currently teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He has published a number of scholarly journal articles exploring Africana history, politics and culture. He is author of the forthcoming, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.

Over the past few weeks there has been a low-humming buzz on dominant media platforms around the release of New York Times Magazine 1619 Project. The lead author, investigative journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that: “The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” History is a very nonlinear, messing process. Therefore, to pinpoint moments as being the beginning can often lead to more questions. In fact, for most of us, history as a concept is narrowly understood. While there is historical specificity to various events and experiences, we must be careful to not miss the convergence, often, of a series of simultaneous events that contribute to what one may identify as the moment, the origin. If we agree, then Dr. John Henrik Clarke’s definition of history becomes very important to highlight: “History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.” It becomes very instructive for a critical reader, particularly when reading projects that are developed for public consumption—to always move directly to the sources. The references. The works cited pages. The footnotes. The end notes. Or, if lucky, to the list of supplementary or more information reading lists. To not understand that all writing is political. And that all efforts to tell stories are rooted in epistemic and philosophical frameworks that guide the way we go about doing the work we do, particularly in attempts to quote—tell the whole story—unquote is to miss exactly who is talking and who they are actually talking to, despite who the author or authors of a discourse are. As critical, intentional thinkers who attempt to engage, map, and push forward knowledge of and about the Africana world and its contributions to and relationships with the world; we do not involve ourselves into putting much energy into petty non-substantive critiques of the work or works of others. But we do pay attention. We are cognizant of the various discourses that are promoted. We are interested in ontological and epistemic decolonization processes... Amiri Baraka once wrote: “The actual beginnings of our expression are post Western (just as they certainly are pre-western). It is only necessary that we arm ourselves with complete self-knowledge the whole technology (which is after all just expression of whoever) will change to reflect the essence of a freed people.” Today, AWNP’s Josh Myers explores 1619 in context. Moving the conversation and offering those who’s curiosities have been primed to see the what this 1619 thing is all about. Josh Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program! Image & Artist: Emilio O'Farrill

Descriptors such as jungle music, negro music, jazz...African American Classical Music. Black Classical Music. Spirit Music...and African Rhythms...have been attached to the vibrational human expressions, that once organized into various rhythms, notes, and harmonies become what we have come to call—music. The deep structures that organize these vibrations have purpose. They have origin. They have life. They represent life. They aide us through life. They are bridges between and expressions of worlds seen and worlds unseen. They are all around us. Exploring the form and functions of African rhythms and all that they contribute to our world are part and parcel of understanding the interconnections between the material and nonmaterial, and how they inform each other. This past April 2019, at the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization’s (ASCAC) meeting held at Medgar Evers College in New York, a discussion titled African Rhythms: A Workshop on Cultural Continuity and the Future of Jazz, was developed to explore what was laid out above. Who you will hear next in order of speaker, the wide-ranging discussion from this meeting: George Turner is a longtime activist from Brooklyn, NY and currently serves on the Board of ASCAC. Hank Williams is a jazz writer and radio host and professor at Lehman College. Dr. Anyabwile Love is an assistant professor of Black Studies at the Community College of Philadelphia and a scholar of John Coltrane. Dr. Josh Myers (AWNP Collective, is assistant professor of Africans Studies at Howard University. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

How do we see?...before you become perplexed at such a simple question...the answer is more complex than we usually give time to consider… If you thought and said, with our eyes! Then you are fractionally correct. And I mean fractionally…because the sciences have proven beyond doubt, opinion or belief that, we quote see unquote with our mind(s). The various conflation of influences that coagulate to shape our perspectives and perceptions that over a course of time and space we have, either, been forced to or voluntarily merge into our life trajectories, is in fact what we see. Therefore, what we feel. And, consequently, what we do (or don’t do) is directly guided by this fact. The universal consciousness of the what physicists have come to discover— a living universe, a collective consciousness to which we are all linked…known to ancient Africans—refined through centuries of civilization of the Nubians and Kemet (Egyptians), known to them as the primordial waters of nun, known and expressed to us daily as, emotion…identified through science as light…is vital to all life—including the life of the mind. Various Africana systems have attempted to systemize this multiplicity of this knowledge filtered through time and space, material and spiritual explorations. For example, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau in African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Principles of Life & Living introduces us to the scared knowledge of what is conceptualized as the Kongo Vee. According to Dr. Fu-key aw Bunseki, the ‘V’ is one of the most important keys to understanding life on the planet earth and the cosmic bodies. The ‘V’ is everything because it is the beginning itself. It is the bridging wire between thinking-matter the human (muntu), and the world of un-thinking matter (the world and source of un-grasped ideas and images. (African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: 130-131). In his book, Dark Light Consciousness, Dr. Bynum adds to our understanding of the role and importance of African wisdom and its influences. In fact, we can say with assured confidence, fundamental facts-or wisdom-that make-up African knowledge systems are the direct origins of contemporary discoveries in various fields of inquiry such as, but not limited to, quantum physics and the musings of advance ideas captured in string theory. Dr. Bynum writes that ‘Light itself now appears more and more to us as a vibration of a fifth dimension. Both forces and Beings appear to us in the realm of light and it is our disposition that influences what we see' (Dark Light Consciousness: 3). In other words, our eyes function to perceive and receive light which allows us to quote see based upon our cultivated (or uncultivated) understanding of the totality of experimental and experiential knowledge invoked by a singular phenomenon or collection of phenomea. More plainly, what we quote see is what our understanding of the mind allows us to quote see. Today, we expand upon and more deeply explore these ideas with Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum, as they are presented in his book, Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality. Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum is former director of the Behavioral Medicine & Anxieties Disorders Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Health Services in Amherst, a clinical psychologist, a practitioner of kundalini yoga, and author of several books of poetry, psychology, and has published numerous clinical articles for scientific journals. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program! Music: The Light Remix (Common)-J Dilla Like it Is-Yusef Lateef Nafas-Zeb Picture: Sirius A

In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Dr. Ronald Walters writes “the power of history is not only its description of events, but also its relation to the identity of those who shape it, and those “who suffer from such shaping. As such, “history” comprises events that groups select as a resource to derive identity and meaning from the past, and to inform present understanding or action. The selectively of such events politicizes history, for the powerful can determine an understanding of historical events consistent with a narrative they wish to advance” (2). Dr. Walters goes on to suggest that a “step toward dismantling systems of oppression in which one cultural group dominates another, reparations are more than simply “payment” for past injury. They are a national question” (3). It is here the myths that support a tenuous national identity crumble with the realities of the systems, conditions and institutions that were constructed to maintain a social order that supports an economic system—in this case racial capitalism. We do not have time to go into the long history of the movement, but highlighting its continuities throughout the world is essential in this period of planetary crisis that are disproportionately impacting the African world. On one level, the essential question of reparations is rooted in the fact that slavery was unjust because it refused to recognize and compensate the labor of those subjected to slavery. In a capitalist society built upon plantation economies, the idea of unpaid labor is in fact a violation of the fundamental principles of the so-called free-market exchange that regulates the notion of supply and demand the establishes the value of both labor and what this labor produces (From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse:109). On another level, the clear morality and legal violations are brought to fore. It is not a question of either, or, but a question of both/and. We will hear Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (older lecture Kingstown, SVG) expand upon reparations. Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He is a distinguished university administrator, economic historian, and specialist in higher education and development thinking and practice; and an internationally reputed historian. Sir Hilary has published and lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. His work includes: Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados and the Caribbean (Rutgers University Press/Zed Book, 1989); Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Societies (James Currey Press/Randle Publishers, 1999; White Servitude and Black Slavery: white indentured servitude in the Caribbean, 1627-1715 (Tennessee University Press, 1989); The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbados, 1627-1876; Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean, (UWI Press, 2015). He is Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparation and Social Justice. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Dr. Ichile in her article titled, Black Magic Woman: Towards a Theory of Africana Women's Resistance suggest that when properly contextualized, the role of enslaved African women in history was multiple, but two primary roles are prevalent, they were both spiritual and political leaders. Contextualized as such, Dr. Ichile then show that three major aspects of women's resistance emerge: (1) African women acted as queens and queen mothers, activated at key moments to galvanize enslaved people seeking not only freedom, but sovereignty; (2) In maroon communities, women's maintenance of African cultural traditions, agricultural production and motherhood made long-term settlements possible; (3) As priestesses and "conjurers," women attacked slaveholders with their spiritual gifts and knowledge, in ways that were sometimes more effective than direct, military confrontation, and were often coordinated to work in tandem with armed conflict. According to Dr. M Bahati Kuumba in, African Women, Resistance Cultures and Cultural Resistances, “for African and African diasporan women, culture is a societal dimension that has complex and contradictory implications with respect to their interests, freedom and rights. On the one hand, established/'traditional' African and African diasporan cultures are replete with practices and perceptions that hegemonize patriarchal interests and women's oppression (McFadden, 1997). And “to make matters worse, nationalist discourse and praxis in many African descendent communities position women as the custodians of and conduits for its customary practices, often serving as their own worst enemies.” Nevertheless, the lives of Africana women “have a long and varied 'herstory' of challenging social injustice by deploying, opposing and transforming cultural systems (Collins, 1990, 2000; Steady, 1987, 1993;Terborg-Penn, 1986).” Another important scholar, Dr. Valethia Watkins in Contested Memories: A Critical Analysis of the Black Feminist Revisionist History Project, suggest that “properly framing and naming the intellectual and political tradition of Black women has become contested terrain and reflects the political and ideological diversity and differences among Black women. Black women are often treated as if they are a homogenous group when, in reality, they are diverse in their political consciousness, perspectives, ideas and commitments as any other group. Black women do not speak with a single voice; hence, efforts to articulate “the” Black women’s standpoint or perspective are misleading and hegemonic by definition. These views, taken together, provide a contested and expands the narrow view of gender, broadly, Women-Africana women, specifically. Dr. Iyelli Ichile earned her PhD in African Diaspora History from Howard University and a Master’s in African American Studies from Columbia University. She has worked with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and developed a research agenda that has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and several university grants. Dr. Ichile has held positions at Temple University, Prince Georges Community College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Florida A&M University, and Goddard College. She is currently a Smithsonian Faculty Fellow at Montgomery College-Rockville. Her work has appeared in Journal of African American History; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Journal of Pan African Studies to name a few. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Note: this program is from 2019! We leave it here for context of the current situation. In a Washington Post article titled, Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots, Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly, writes “On Dec. 19 2018, the town of Atbara in northeastern Sudan erupted in protest against the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for almost three decades. People took to the streets following a tripling of bread prices to demand “freedom, peace, justice and the downfall of the regime.” But international coverage framing the protests as bread riots obscures the larger political context, misrepresents protesters’ demands and supports the regime’s insistence that the crisis can be resolved by simply reintroducing targeted subsidies and stabilizing the Sudanese pound.” Let’s contextualize this important moment in the African world that is directly related to the long tradition of protest and resistance in the region referred to as Sudan further. According to Nisrin and Zachariah, “It is no coincidence that the protests began in Atbara, a town known for its powerful railroad workers union. Sudan has a history of successful revolutions against military regimes, most notably in 1964 and in 1985, in which trade unions and student movements played a pivotal role. But the absence of formal trade unions and independent local governing structures did not prevent people from forming alternative grass-roots structures for mobilizing against political repression. Youth movements and independent farmer and worker formations multiplied over the last decade as people lost faith in established opposition parties and politics. Most notably, from 2012 to 2014, students and the urban poor held a variety of creative protests before being repressed by the regime. With the oil-export economy emerging in the 1990s, other sectors that produced food and cash crops were left to wither away or were privatized and handed off to foreign investors or regime loyalists. All in all, the conditions that spurred the current Sudan uprisings, were proliferated and promoted by austerity measures recommended by the IMF in 2017 (known as structural adjustment programs). Today, Africa World Now Project’s Mwiza Munthali discusses the uprisings in Sudan with Nisrin Elamin. Nisrin Elamin is a Sudanese writer, activist and PhD candidate in Anthropology, based in the New York City area. She has over 15 years of experience working with community-based organizations as an educator, organizer and advocate. Most recently, she served as a Director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project’s summer leadership and social justice program for young women and non-binary folks at City College. She also works part-time with the group African Communities Together, which organizes around immigrant, civil and workers’ rights in New York and in Washington DC. Her research examines the ways Saudi and Emirati ‘land grabs’ are reconfiguring social relations between landholding and landless communities in central Sudan. In January of 2017, she was one of the first people to be detained under the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, causing her work to be interrupted. But since then, she has been able to return to Sudan to complete her research. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! For more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/12/28/recent-protests-in-sudan-are-much-more-than-bread-riots/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fce161deb4fd https://www.thenation.com/article/sudan-protests-revolution-bashir/ Image: Alaa Salah, 22, stands on a vehicle as she sings to the crowd. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Writing in Where is the ‘African’ in African Studies, on African Arguments, Robtel Pailey asserts that “the extent to which the ‘African’ in African Studies is concealed or revealed depends entirely on the politics of the knowledge producer, the ethos of the institution they represent, the pedagogy and methods they employ, and their level of commitment to the continent and its people.” In Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, Achille Mbembe presents a theoretical lens through which we can use to examine current conditions in present societies who are a product of settler colonialism, (neo)colonialism, chattel slavery, etc. Mbembe introduces us to the notion of a ‘negative moment’ (2015). Mbembe goes on to argue that “blackness” is fracturing. “Black consciousness” today is more and more thought of in fractions.” It is here, the clarity of what a negative moment comes to the fore, it is a moment when new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved. It is a moment when contradictory forces—undeveloped, fractured, fragmented—are at work but what might come out of their interaction is anything but certain. It is also a moment when multiple old and recent unresolved crises seem to be on the path towards a collision.” It is in this moment that knowledge, understanding, and power converge. It here is that the mere prohibitive structures, institutions, and systems that promote some forms of knowledge, and demonize others is an act of violence. What we suggest is a real attempt to decolonize not only the university and knowledge, we must decolonize, decolonization. Decolonization is not new, of course. In fact, its dominant conceptualization and current discourse is a product of African postcolonial experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Where does this negative moment place us in the context of addressing current planetary crises, rooted in the aggressive proliferation of racial capitalist logic(s)? Where do we start an intentional and serious commitment to decolonize? Today we will explore the possibilities of an African future through decolonizing African Studies with Dr. Robtel Pailey. Robtel Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author with more than 15 years of combined personal/professional experiences in Africa, Europe and North America. She is also author of Gbagba and Jaadeh, critically acclaimed anti-corruption children’s books. Robtel completed BA degrees in African Studies and English Literature at Howard University, a MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as a Mo Ibrahim Foundation PhD Scholar. Robtel currently serves as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (ODID), where she conducts research on race, citizenship, ‘South-South’ migration and development cooperation in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Today, Africa World Now Project collectives' Tasneem Siddiqui and Keisha-Khan Perry sit down with Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and explore the contours, continuities, and evolutions in Africana radical sociopolitical thought. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor is author of, Haymarket Books 2016, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, where it examines the history and politics of Black America and the development of Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States. Professor Taylor’s most recent book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, also with Haymarket Books (2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Dr. Taylor’s research examines race and public policy including American housing policies. Dr. Taylor's current work: Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip (2019), explores U.S. federal government's promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taylor looks at how the federal government's turn to market-based solutions in its low-income housing programs in the 1970s impacted Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and emergent discourses on an urban “underclass”. Professor Taylor is particularly interested in the role of private sector forces, typically hidden in the development and implementation of public policy, in the “urban crisis” of the 1970s. Professor Taylor’s work has been supported, in part, by a multiyear Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Our show was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program! Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip available: https://www.amazon.com/Race-Profit-Industry-Undermined-Homeownership/dp/1469653664/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=keeanga-yamahtta+taylor&qid=1555627062&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Sterling A. Brown work amplifies and materialize the nature of the aesthetic connections that find continuity in contemporary black life. Brown opens, Southern Road with an epigraph of an old negro spiritual: ‘O de ole sheep dey knows de road, Young lambs gotta find de way.’ It is with this, Sterling A Brown highlights the intentions of his work which is ‘to face two directions at simultaneously'. To look forward into the future while facing the past, the poems in Southern Road consider the relationship between the [past and present] and its relevance to Black people entering the European conceptualization of modernity (Gabbin, Sterling A Brown, Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, 1985: 3. For Sterling A. Brown, diving into the depths of human experience and character necessitated a close look at language. In a 1978 interview Brown stated that, “The poets that struck me were those who were poets of the people and poets of direct—not florid…American speech.” The contribution that Brown offered is a clear understanding that what the ‘new’ poets were doing with language was not new (30). Today Dr. Josh Myers will explore the work of Sterling A. Brown in a presentation titled, A Blue(s) (Note) for Sterling Brown. In addition to being a valued member of the AWNP collective and its affiliates, Dr. Josh Myers is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He currently serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with the DC area collectives, Positive Black Folks in Action and the Nu Afrikan Cultural Vanguard. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Knowledge, and Society, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces. His book, “We are Worth Fighting For: The Howard University Protest of 1989” is forthcoming. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!