Traditional drumming, choreography and songs by legendary singer/dancer, La Sosso and Trass' La" will give the night an Afro-Caribbean flan. Also appearing will be the upbeat and energetic "Jeff Joseph & Gramacks New Generation," who is a favorite at festivals in Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint-Martin and Martinique with his mix of reggae, meringue, calypso and soca. Mayer Morisset and Decibel will bring their island spirit to the crowd as well as Christiane Valejo, the internationally known singer/songwriter and zouk sensation from Martinique.
A graduate of Howard University and the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, Crenshaw currently serves as vice president for economic development of the Washington, D.C.-based Organization of Africans in the Americas (OAA). Founded nearly six years ago as a support group, OAA functions as a resource and referral center of data, service and empowerment of Africans in the Americas. Nevertheless, Franklin is eager to point an emerging Black movement across Latin America that is battling to become a part of the political and economic process of the region. "We are now working very hard to ensure that genuine changes are brought about, especially as they affect the lives of the millions of Blacks in Latin America," the OAA executive director said. Some of those changes include linking Black Latin students and other aspiring small entrepreneurs with the Howard University Small Business Center in northwest Washington, D.C. "We are working to develop sustainable linkages between Blacks in America and Blacks in Latin America," said Crenshaw, who noted that Howard already has a growing number of Black Latin American students.
One of the things attracting tourists has taught us is to value the habit of preservation. We have to depend on devoted scholars and archeology diggers and always, tenacious individuals like Dr. Walter Roth. He was a medical man of German stock who moved to Guyana by way of Australia and was the moving spirit in the rise of Georgetown's museum of natural history. As a youth I made many trips to this museum and was fascinated by its presentation and displays; for instance the diorama of gold-digging operations in the far interior, the lighted fish tanks with fish such as the blood-thirsty pirai, a lifelike representation on the wall of the world's biggest freshwater fish, the arapaima, caught in Guyana. A huge live anaconda pans have all but vanished.
It's only after Jean-Bertrand was airborne - on a U.S government aircraft - and the genocide had just about run its course, that Mr. Global Panacea himself, George Bush, announced that he was sending marines "...to help bring order to Haiti." He's the same person who, early in the crisis stated that any Haitian refugees who attempted to enter the US would be returned to Haiti. Here in North America it's `tribalism' of another kind; the police call the players "gangs," their issues... "gang violence." [Ooops! I would be remiss if I didn't thank the Bush-Blair tandem, but especially President George Bush, on the first anniversary of that stupendous victory over Iraq - what with it's ominous repertoire of weapons of mass destruction and all. It brought an end to Saddam Hussein's decades-old reign of terror and, more importantly, the "liberation of the Iraqi people..."
Very few people have ever heard of the war between the Blacks and Mulattoes in Haiti. This was a war between light-skinned Blacks and dark skinned Blacks. Interestingly, outsiders who had a stake in dividing Haiti's victorious army engineered this war. The old adage of divide and conquer that was used and is still used. If the students at Howard University who devised the paper bag test had only read of the war between mulattoes and black in Haiti they would have been ashamed of their actions. Other African Americans immigrated to Haiti, stayed, and became prominent members of Haitian society. Hezekiah Grice was an Afro American leader, and a supporter of emigration by Blacks to Haiti. He was convinced that there would never be full emancipation for Blacks in this country. Outraged at the treatment of his people in America, he immigrated to Haiti, and became the director of Public Works in Port-Au-Prince.
