by Wanda Sabir
A woman who knew how to have fun while working for systemic change, Denise worked as a community organizer and always knew where the pulse was on an issue. Denise was well-loved in the African immigrant community here and abroad and was first call for current events whether that was China’s treatment of African immigrants or COVID-19 in Congo. She got the information and immediately sent it out.
She was first to model African-centered face masks, riding the bus to Berkeley to support an African woman-owned business. A founding member of Bay Area Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) in 2006, Denise was a Race Woman, in the spirit of the Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
The last time I saw Denise, she was standing at Lake Merritt smiling and waving as she documented our twice monthly – first and third Fridays – car caravan. We waved at each other. Later she told me she crossed the street and explained to the curious men exercising near Embarcadero the protest objectives: BLM, end police violence, voter rights, 2020 census. I looked at my phone the day I learned she died, July 20, and saw two texts in WhatsApp about Rep. Lewis date stamped 4:15 and 5:07 a.m. (Nunu and I both reflected on that last message.)
She is being interned at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. Visit the site for updates on funeral arrangements. You can also visit the website at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, where Denise was a member. She is survived by her mom, Mrs. Thelma Gums, and two sisters, Deborah and Karen Gums, aunts and an uncle, cousins and of course too many friends to count. She is preceded in death by her father, Mr. Louis Gums, and brother, Kevan Gums.
If anyone is interested in helping with burial costs, please contact Mr. Osagie A.D. Enabulele, community leader, 510-393-6262. The funeral service is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. Check the Chapel of the Chimes for the details on the virtual ceremony.
Black August is a time of reflection on African Diaspora revolutionary politics, rebellions, resistance. We remember the lives of fallen comrades, especially those like George Jackson and Marilyn Buck and Safiya Bukari (now ancestors), behind enemy lines, bodies once confined but spirits free. We hosted a couple remarkable MAAFA Virtual Townhalls in June and July.
The first, June 28, honored the legendary activist and artist, Beah Richards, whose centennial birthday was July 12 (1920-2020). We showed LisaGay Hamilton’s film, “Beah: A Black Woman Speaks,” which takes its title from her poem by the same title. The director joined us afterward for a discussion in Zoom. For the second townhall, July 26, just a week ago, Melanie DeMore hosted a Gullah Stick-pounding workshop. If anyone is interested in joining us Aug. 23, send a message through wandaspicks.com We post response narratives afterward in http://maafasanfranciscobayarea.blogspot.com/.
We are so excited to welcome home Patricia Wright, whose sentence was commuted and she was released July 21, just after her birthday, July 17. Snatched from her family 24 years ago, son Alfey Ramdhan, just 11 or 12 at the time, recalls how hard it was growing up without the person he trusted the most.
Paths to Empowerment: A Conversation about Cooperative Governance in Arts Organizations is an online Zoom meeting Thursday, Aug. 27, 7 p.m. The cost is free. And Eventbrite RSVP is required: www.eventbrite.com/e/paths-to-empowerment-a-convesation-about-cooperative-governance-tickets-114463810338. The Facebook event is at www.facebook.com/events/1617729515085813/.
While the car was carrying Representative Lewis’s immobile frame across the EP Bridge, a position in which he led the 1965 march known as Blood Sunday, I wondered why at a time when monuments to civic criminals are being eliminated, this EP bridge is named after a confessed racist? Why isn’t this honorary name removed? A few days later, in Washington at the Rotunda, this feeling was expressed.
Whenever the EP call is mentioned, it honors your call. Such juxtaposition is not a more austere hypocrisy than this symbol: the greatest human rights defender, the presence of John Lewis in a coffin crossing this position for the last time in a carriage.
Red rose petals on the ground recall all the blood that Sunday morning, a lot of it running down the face of a young John Lewis. Alabama residents should rename the bridge John Robert Lewis Bridge for a man whose life was a bridge for justice and freedom for his people.
For those 18-year-olds this year, too young to have met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., this young son of enslaved former ancestors was King’s emissary. Representative Lewis continued his hero’s march to freedom by crossing bridges like this, philosophically and then materially, each and every day of his life as Freedom Rider, president of the SNCC and then as a member of Atlanta City Council and despite each and every one of them. all as a leader of Congress for 17 terms (33 years).
It’s as if Dr. King has never died, the oath John Lewis had promised at 18, as prophetic as he was at 80. He was an active member of this democratic society. He’s a visual opponent of injustice. He used his pen to enact laws, his voice to say no to unethical policies, and his framework for interrupting or preventing what he thought was negative for the American people.
Let other people say: Aṣẹ, Amen, Hallelujah, and much worse.
The 17th annual International Oceanic Film Festival becomes virtual with Reconnecting Summer 2020 with 54 films, including panels, discussions and questions online from July 30 to August. 9. See www.intloceanfilmfest.org.
“River City Drumbeat” (95 minutes), directed by Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté, premieres August 7-21 at the Roxie Virtual Cinema. The film features the 30th anniversary of Edward “Nardie” White’s career at the helm of the dynamic River City Drum Corps in Louisville, Kentucky, and recounts his step from witness to alumnus Albert Shumake. It’s a beautiful story of an inherited art to build character.
“River City” shows how much network is what topics in a child’s life. The drum is the heart; it is the love of a mother, the first voice, the maximum vital voice that a child hears or feels. White’s program builds men and women because it provides parents with an area for their roles. The music is great; We dance in applause, weeping and marveling at those young leaders who form and assume duty with ease and joy. Art is what will save us. It helps keep us human.
Hear Albert Shumate talk about how River City Drum Corps literally stored his life. The radio show Wanda’s Picks aired a special on July 13 on “River City Drumbeat” with directors Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté joining Albert Shumake. Listen to http://tobtr.com/11773949.
Very rare are the stories of smart fortune, the intelligent stories about our young others on the front page of the newspapers, however, despite the lack of local and national recognition, is this story. RCDC founder and former Boys and Girls Club director Edward “Nardie” White has had a significant effect on Louisville youth, their parents and the network that hosts them. With Shumake as his new director, Mr. White can nevertheless retire and become the artist he sought to be, not that the young lives he shaped are not his greatest vital and vital work.
Young drummers are informed on the ground as they celebrate African heritage. They recite values in their commitment and are informed of the importance of the network, as the interconnections of human life are illustrated in the bodies of the drums.
Winning is not the goal, Mr. White teaches young people. There are tangible rewards directly similar to difficult paintings and practice: excellence. There is also the additional price of peers who literally each other, such as older students, such as Imani V. Keith, teach each of the categories and the percentage of what they have learned with long-term youth.
The co-directors, Marlon Johnson in Miami and Anne Flatte in San Francisco, communicate with each other through Owley Brown, a manufacturer who grew up in Louisville and understands the strength of music to replace lives. Mr. White saw Albert Shumake and said, “He won’t be an athlete,” and steered young Albert to art. White’s wife, “Iya,” Zambia Nkrumah, whom we know through his reputation and archived images, also framed Albert and looked after him. She kept it from the typical racialized educational paths where young black men are trapped. She told him it was an educational curtain when her teachers and principals didn’t see its potential.
Mr. White, who was looking to be an artist, encouraged him to play sports. There’s no one to interfere with him. We meet Ed Hamilton, a prominent Louisville artist who was Shumake’s apprentice. Hamilton’s paintings are a central facet of the film, which revolves around rivers and bridges and damaged promises: a statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting on the shore overlooking the Ohio River while a piano only plays what can be an interlude to a lifetime to come. if nothing changes.
These children, who are raised through their peers and guided by Mr. White and now Mr. Shumake, are informed that they have options. Education is the key. Jailen Leavell, a classmate, reflects on Tupac Shukur’s poem, “The Rose That Was Born from Concrete.” If you know the poem, the question is: why does a child, or a flower, fight so hard for a chance to live?
In historic black communities such as the West End community where the RCDC was born, there were not many couples like White and Nkrumah who created an establishment to serve the art of young black men to expand “a plan for good fortune in life.” The RCDC is philosophically similar to Katherine Dunham’s paintings in East St. Louis, Illinois, Ms. Ruth Beckford here in Oakland, Deborah Vaughn, Dimensions Dance Theatre in Oakland, Dr. Albirda Rose, Village Dancers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The RCDC serves other young people between the ages of five and 18 and is founded in Nguzo Saba or Seven Principals of Kwanzaa. Children of all ethnicities and devout backgrounds are accepted; most are young black men. Unfortunately, Mr. White and his wife beyond due have not been able to save all their young people in the more than 30 years and we are informed of some of those who suffer in the daily war in American communities, a war that citizens involved and massacred make. Don’t start, even if occasionally the finger that presses the cause and the bodies that fall beneath it have an effect in that occasionally resemble each other.
Tickets can be purchased in bit.ly/rcdatroxie. See the preview here and below: https://www.rivercitydrumbeatmovie.com/.
It is the 75th anniversary of Bob Marley’s birth on February 6, 1945. His circle of relatives celebrates all year round. On Friday, July 31, “Marley” (145 minutes), directed through Kevin Macdonald, opens practically and in some movie parks across the country. Locally, the film is screened at the Smith Rafael Center and cameo Cinema in San Francisco Bay, in Sacramento Tower. Visit https://www.bluefoxentertainment.com/movies/marley. Watch and share the progress.
The film is a nuanced story of a guy who has spent his life searching for a sanctuary. The son of a white man and a black girl, he only joined when he played music. He knew his white circle of relatives and the factory they owned, his white circle of relatives did not know his black brother. When he takes them to his paintings, his sister says Bob’s paintings raised his surname. However, Bob and his friends strived for their good fortune: one user said they were so hungry when they were children that they deserve to fill themselves with water and go to bed. This is one of the reasons her mom left the country for the city.
There are archiving scenes of old bands with game tools that probably made, guitars, banjos. Bob and his friends also made their tools. There was a clever verbal exchange with record makers who saw Bob’s taste of writing: he had depth. His subjects were not superficial. Religion also gave Bob a sense of belonging: Rastafari aligned with his beliefs. There is a great scene in which Haile Selassie visits Jamaica and when the door opens and sees so many other people waiting for his arrival, he returns to the cabin and closes the door.
I guess it’s annoying to be received as a god.
Intelligent, shy with trust issues, Marley discovered in his artistic voice a scene in which he had a place. Macdonald’s Marley presents interviews with friends musicians, children, lovers, manufacturers and footage from the Trench Town ghetto where Marley lived, the studio he and his friend gave safe haven when his mother left for the United States.
In addition to reading an e-book about Marley, this film is an audio tour of an extraordinary life. He grew up with gangsters, but he’s not a gangster. He was poor, but he ended up with the wealth he shared. He disciplined and old-fashioned, even patriarchal in terms of gender roles.
Marley is wonderful and imperfect, especially in her dating with women. His relationship with his wife Rita Marley is complex, as complex as the politics of the music world. The search for an exclusive sound while the band plays bands of guys who go on the run and become famous in Jamaica. I love the studio sessions of Lee Scratch Perry and Peter Tosh.
Marley is exiled for her art. His philosophy is simple, but one wonders about the diseases that take his life.
The music is amazing, allowing us to see the Wailers in small places with the audience alongside the artists. Given the truth of COVID-19, this film and this era seem to be a lifetime. With the purchase of the price ticket, recipients will get an exclusive Ziggy Marley song download package. In addition, all price ticket purchases will be entered to win a big prize, adding an upcoming Bob Marley photo book, Marley vinyl and a variety of other Marley products.
Wanda Sabir, editor-in-chief of Bay View Arts, can be reached at [email protected]. Visit their online page at www.wandaspicks.com the month for updates on Wanda’s Picks, its blog, photographs and Wanda’s Picks radio. Their systems are broadcast live on Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 a.m., can be heard by phone at 347-237-4610 and are archived in http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks.