Sekou Sundiata.

I'm just posting this because I like it.
Sekou Sundiata

http://thenewcurriculum.blogspot.com/2012/03/all-depends-on-skin-youre-living-in.html

And  I found another version!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR0nTMg3kbs

Thanks, For Harriet, and A Thousand Friends

Thanks, For Harriet, and a Thousand Friends

May 1, 2014 at 5:11pm

National Poetry Month, 2014 has been incredibly busy for me.  Great readings with many of my poet friends.  I've shared my work with audiences at the Poetry Zone, The SB Museum of Art, The Book Den, Carpinteria High School, UCSB's San Miguel Residence Hall, and at Alameda Park during two days of the SB's Earth Festival. Its been a tremendous excursion,  Nevertheless, nothing matches my exhilaration at the sudden publication of my current "featured poem" on the For Harriet webpage "Soar". 
http://soar.forharriet.com/2014/04/i-am-that-woman.html

For Harriet also posted it to their Facebook Page which has over 57,000 followers https://www.facebook.com/forharriet
 It was published on April 26 and appears in close proximity to stories about Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Coretta Scott King and Alice Walker.  The poem "I Am That Woman" has already had nearly 900 likes and over 200 shares.  The comments are greatly appreciated.
It is the affirmations from my family, my friends, and all whom I encounter, that fuel my journey.

Sojourner on UCSB Writers Cafe Radio podcast

http://www.kcsb.org/blog/2013/12/31/sojourner-kincaid-rolle-gets-jazzed-writers-cafe/

Ode to Arlington West at Santa Barbara

Ode to Arlington West at Santa Barbara

To honor M/Sgt J.G. Kincaid, Jr.; Lt. Col. James and Shirley Kennedy;

Sgt. Robert Potter.

Arlington West at Santa Barbara

Ten years bearing witness to scores of wartime dead.

Years of toil and dedication and sweat

etched in the silhouette of every faded footstep in the sand

Here seagulls fly over and daily stand in formation like sentries on the beach - come wind or calm

and cormorant perch atop the wooden posts at dawn and in the noonday sun.

Sundays came and went

Crosses went up and were taken down.

Flags were raised and lowered in due respect

Faithful stood and walked among the crowd and loved ones found their loved ones's names beribboned standing duty  in the sand.

Tears were shed for those whose names were written and those whose names we carried in our hearts.

This tear-drenched sand rendered sacred by our presence and, in its ebb and flow, the tide claims its everlasting salt;

its worth forever mingled with the sea.

Here we remember those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan;

and through them every war-dead:

Those who succumbed in a desert storm

and by association those whose wounded

hearts and mangled bodies lived long enough to come back home only to crumble on the doorsteps of their birth.

Here's to those who died from any war - every war -

On rural roads across the desolate plains; on urban streets and boulevards;

in run-down crevices and cracks;

in make-shift shelters from the storms;

their minds etched with horrid acts of inhumanity.

Neither rank nor privilege; no class, no hierarchy nor hoarded stores of grain

can hide from sight the simple crosses -

row on row - all equal in their silent witness; deafening testimony to the awful cost of war.

Here palm trees sway in stately splendor like cedars in ancient Lebanon.

Here white crosses stood like red poppies on a distant battlefield.

Here in the face of every blue-bright morning; in the sight of every red-tinged sunset, memory resides.

Seagulls will still stand facing the sunset. Visitors will still visit this hallowed place

where martyred names stood duty on the pebbled shore.

Here's to the memories of veterans past.

Here's to the hope that there will be no veterans of future wars.

Here's to the Veterans for Peace.

Here’s to the citizens of good-will,

and to all who came and will come

to this place of remembrance.

Here's to Arlington West

at Santa Barbara

Here's to Peace -

Forever.

Sojourner Kincaid Rolle – November 10, 2013

All Rights Reserved   Santa Barbara, CA

Photo by Paul Wellman

La Bloga: Sojourner Kincaid Rolle in the Poetry Zone

La Bloga: Sojourner Kincaid Rolle in the Poetry Zone

Sojourner Kincaid Rolle - Poet/ Peace - Reads at the Carnegie Art Museum

Ventura County Reporter - Poetry and peace

Trayvon Martin and the Persistence of Insistence

I wrote this poem, "Why Am I Here" and its prologue sometime in the early nineties and have read it many times over the last twenty(give or take a few) years. This matter of young people dying for the mere fact of being black is abomination that should not be rested on the shoulders of our children.

The Prologue

August 28, 1955, young Emmett Till, while visiting his grandparents in Money, Mississippi, was beaten, shot to death and thrown into the river for the dubious offense of saying "Bye, Baby" to a white woman.

September 15, 1963 - Only eighteen days after the exuberant March On Washington, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, were killed when their Birmingham, Alabama Bible class was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

August 23, 1990 - Yusuf Hawkins, an honors student from Brooklyn, New York, while in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, looking for a used car to buy, was brutally beaten to death by a gang of young white men because he was in "their" neighborhood.

The shocking news of each of these deaths reverberated throughout the land. The murder of Emmet Till sparked a generation of young people, his peers, to become the willing workers in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's. The bomb killing of the four young girls in Birmingham redoubled the outrage of a generation and shattered any illusion that this movement for freedom was to be simple or safe. The bludgeoning of Yusuf Hawkins was a brutal reminder of an unfinished agenda. Over 7000 people took to the streets to protest his killing.

Young people of every generation have been martyrs.  These three atrocities, unfortunately, are only representative of hundreds and hundreds of young Americans of African descent who have been cut down in the tender stages of their lives. Young people for whom we have worked so hard that they might have a better life. Young people needed in the lifelong movement toward a better world.

We who survive, who live, must have a commitment to continue the work set in motion many generations ago, that to the day of our freedom, total freedom, we must ever be workers on behalf of our people. Above all, we must never forget. To quote philosopher George Santayana,' Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

The following poem was inspired by a 1990 news clipping from my friend, Mrs. Valencia King Nelson, reporting that an Alabama man who remembered was soliciting funds to have a headstone place on the unmarked grave of Addie Mae Collins, one of the four girls killed in the 1963 church bombing.

The Poem

Why Am I Here

To remind you
Of the innocent child

Of the promise
Unfulfilled

To remind you
Of Yusuf Hawkins

Reminding you
Of Emmitt Till

Of four girls swaddled
In unheralded graves

Young unwitting warriors
Forgotten

Of infant trees
On forsaken lots

Cut in stride
Toward the dream

Young blood reddening
Mississippi mud

Alabama clay
New York streets

Young hearts
Stilled mid-beat

Tender memories
Waiting

Tragic martyrs
Shining