1 September 2020 — Black Agenda Report

Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 31, 2020 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
White Capitalist Law vs “Uncontrollable Blackness” / The Black Geography of HIV-AIDS / Biography of a Largely Forgotten Black Political Giant

White Capitalist Law vs “Uncontrollable Blackness” 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
The United States “criminalizes Black Americans,” but Black men “are not looking to be controlled” by this racist system, said Douglas Flowe, an historian at Washington University, in St. Louis, and author of the book, “Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York.”  Dr Flowe wants his audience to “understand what it is that might exist in American society that might render illegality into a form of resistance when the law, itself, is stacked against you.”

The Black Geography of HIV-AIDS 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
When HIV-AIDS struck in Philadelphia, mostly white organizations and epidemiologists “were blinded to the kind of locations and geography” where the contagion might be centered in the Black community, said JT Roane, a Fellow at the Schomburg Research Center. “They all but ignored Back communities and Black queer bars” in placing AIDS awareness information. Dr Roane has written a book on the subject and is author of the article, “Black Harm Reduction Politics in the Early Philadelphia Epidemic.”

Biography of a Largely Forgotten Black Political Giant 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
The second volume on the life and works of Hubert Harrison, the Harlem-based activist, organizer and journalist, is about to be released. Biographer Jeff Perry has spent almost four decades researching Harrison, who he described as “a socialist who worked closely with Marcus Garvey and was the first to write about the ‘New Negro’ in the first quarter of the 20th century.” Harrison deserves to be in the pantheon of formative Black political thinkers and doers, but his principled politics, unsparing journalistic critiques, and refusal to be bought earned him few boosters.