43.2 The Drop Radio
  • HOME
  • DROP LIBRARY
  • DROP PACKAGES
  • LIVE ON AIR!
    • SHOW ARCHIVES
    • SHOW PLAYLISTS
  • VIBE SUITES
    • INDIGENOUS FLUTE
    • LOVER'S ROCK (LOVE SONGS)
    • THE HIGH ROAD (ALTERNATIVE)
    • JAMMIN' REBEL (REGGAE)
    • MIMOSA (JAZZ)
    • THE BASEMENT (RAP)
    • NEON VALLEY (POP / RNB)
    • THE MIDNIGHT HOUR (BEDROOM)
    • EBONY EYEZ (SOUL RNB)
    • LET'S COOL ONE (CHILL MIX)
    • THE DROP ZONE (DOPE DROP MIX)
    • B.O.B IS BANGIN'
  • WHAT IS 432HZ?
  • ARTISTS LOUNGE
  • DROP NETWORKS
    • DROP ARTISTS NETWORK
    • FOOD TRUCK DROP NETWORK
  • DROP ALBUMS
  • ADVERTISE

THE DROP IS KNOWLEDGE
POWER
ORGANIC 432 FREQUENCY

432hz, the natural vibration of the Earth is mathematically consistent with Love. Vibrate in our "Vibe Suites" and "Artists Lounge" featuring the hottest indie artists and producers in the world. Stay tuned... our live 43.2 The Drop Radio shows are almost back!

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE TO DROP NATION VIP

BLACK HISTORY: THE GIFTS THE ANCESTORS GAVE, FROM THE NILE TO THE DELTA

2/16/2015

3 Comments

 
Picture
When we contemplate our history, for too many of us our vision is stunted by the wages of oppression. We can’t see the vastness of the treasures that lead from abundant empires directly to our doorstep because we have been affixed with the blinders of racism and white supremacy, which distort and destroy everything they touch. 
So at Atlanta Blackstar our mission for the 2015 edition of Black History Month is to tear away the blinders and revel in the glory of our people, diving into the ancient civilizations that birthed us, bathing in the wonders that sprouted on the shores of the Nile, in the brilliance that grew out of the Congo.

We asked a team of talented writers and scholars to mimic the dance of the Sankofa bird and carry us back to our roots so that we may move forward. We will be presenting their efforts throughout the rest of February in an impressive array of pieces that reveal to us from whence we came and where we might want to go. There is nothing quite so edifying and necessary as African history, for its grandeur is spectacular in direct proportion to the depths of scarcity we were trained to believe in the New World. It is as essential to us as the air we breathe. We asked our writers to use as a template the words of Langston Hughes, who penned “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as a 17-year-old boy crossing the Mississippi. Hughes uses the metaphor of the river as a way to trace the splendor of African people. Here at Atlanta Blackstar, we see these as words to live by:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The ‘Gifts the Ancestors Gave’: From Africa to the DeltaBy Leonore TuckerFar too often, the Black history timeline is set for us beginning in 1619, yet the Mississippi Delta bespeaks an accomplished past that began in Africa and continued into the Americas. This February, let’s reaffirm a Black history that started long before the first African slave was born on American soil. This month “let’s take it way back.” In the spirit of the Sankofa bird, let us look back and discover our history. It is ours to claim. Let’s “reach back and get it” so we can move forward.

Each year I attend Dance Africa at BAM in Brooklyn, New York. Before the sounding of drums that revive our African Diasporic heartbeat, the audience is initiated for the performances by listening as Baba Charles Chuck Davis, the event’s director, MC and founder, recites the words of the poem “Spirits” by Birago Diop, the Senegalese poet.

“Listen to Things more often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire, Hear the voice of water. Listen in the wind, to the bush that is sobbing: This is the ancestors, breathing.”
Picture
If we listen, we’ll hear rhythms of Africa that sailed to the Delta to be danced to in New Orleans’ Congo Square. If we listen, we hear the voice of the fire as evidenced in the Delta blacksmiths’ artistry on an iron fence in New Orleans, where the Sankofa symbol is welded, linking us to the great bronze sculptors from the kingdoms of West Africa. When we listen to the wind, we know that the seeds of the Harlem Renaissance and great writers like Mississippi native Richard Wright started long ago in Mali with the epic of the Sundiata long before we spoke English. Can the church say Amen? Yes, it can, because it started with the call-and-response tradition of the griots of Africa.

I choose not to think of my ancestors as powerless chattel in the dark bowels of a slave ship. My ancestors’ identity didn’t begin after being sold by slave traders no more than European Jews began with the images we see of them in concentration camps. I choose to remember a complete history.

Luckily, there are things, pieces of evidence of our great past that have been discovered and studied so we don’t have to look far to access them. All we need to do is push a button on a keyboard and we can travel back in time with more information than the mind can handle at once. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a complete time line of African art starting from 800 A.D. If one wants to view it, there are any number of retellings of the history of Sundiata Keita, the great Malian King, online. I remember sitting entranced during a long hair-braiding session once and viewing a modern adaptation of this epic on DVD.

West Africans were renowned for their bronze, iron and terracotta sculpting as well as weaving. They used methods and techniques that were not known by their European contemporaries, such as lost-wax casting. Their sculptures have been described by critics as possessing “more humanity; more individuality” and being more “refined and naturalistic sculpture.”

The European artists Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Brancusi were all influenced by African art, so is there any wonder that we would see its influence in the Delta?

Picture
Some famous West African art pieces are the “Head of the King of IFE”; “The Nok Terracottas”; “Girdle,” (12th century; Tellem); “Head,” (12th–15th century Nigeria, Esie) and “Mother and Child,” (15th–20th century). The “Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba,” (16th century; Nigeria; Edo people, court of Benin) depicts a royal woman who was an adviser to the throne in Benin.

The medieval African woman with her thick beautiful braids sculpted from soapstone in the Head from Nigeria, Esie, resembles gifted diva songstresses Mahalia Jackson and Leontyne Price.

The strength, beauty, leadership and wisdom portrayed in The Queen Mother Pendant Masks recall that of Delta Queens: Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Myrlie Evers-Williams and Oprah Winfrey.

Picture
 From the hands of the Tellem people who crafted the “Girdle” in the 12th century descended the hands of Delta quilt makers and ultimately the masterful Northern United States artist Faith Ringgold. One day I learned a valuable lesson from Ms. Ringgold. She had come into a store that I worked in and I quickly waited on her so that I could service the next person. Almost immediately, I realized the greatness of the person who had been in front of me. I felt so ashamed that I had rushed her along without first acknowledging who she was and thanking her for her contributions to my life. When I look back, I realized that I had profiled Ms. Ringgold as a mere senior citizen with long locked white hair. In this same way in the past, when many Europeans came upon art from West Africa, some assumed it was impossible for it to be Africans because of its complexity of craftsmanship. I will always take this lesson with me: Never judge a book by its cover. We of the African Diaspora carry the DNA of those who designed and built the kingdoms of Mali and Benin. People traveled from around the world to get to the great library of Timbuktu that our ancestors created.In so many ways, the seeds of the ancestors planted in the new world have achieved greatness today, and there is an unquestionable connection between the Delta and Africa. It’s manifested in jazz and blues. A short list of Delta musicians includes: The Marsalis family, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Jelly Roll Morton, Ruby Elzy, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith and Cassandra Wilson.

A few past literary gems from the Delta are Margaret Walker and Etheridge Knight. Contemporary writers include Mildred Taylor (“Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry”), the writer-scholar Lerone Bennett Jr. (“Before the Mayflower”) and Ann Taylor (“Coming of Age in Mississippi”).

Contemplation of the West Africa-Delta connection inspired poet Langston Hughes to pen the celebrated poem “Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

When we look back to explore our African history and reaffirm the truth about the greatness from which we came, it frees us to reach our true potential without feeling a need to embrace tired ignorant stereotypes of ourselves as a people. We know that although we may have arrived in the Americas in chains and shackles, we already held within our very DNA the knowledge and the power with which in time we would weld those shackles and sculpt them into our own reality.

As we look back in the spirit of the Sankofa, we may have to give ourselves permission to “reach back and take it.” We may feel that African achievements do not belong to us since, after all, we were sold away from Africa, but like Sundiata, the King of Mali, we must accept that this greatness is our inheritance. Perhaps we must also forgive and reconcile with Mother Africa for sending us far away from her across the ocean.

This February perhaps we can begin with the words of the Rachelle Farrell song “Forgive You”:
“I just wanna be whole again I want to be free again. Want to be me again. I just want to heal”
“I forgive you totally completely now what a feeling just releasing from my heart from my mind and soul!”

Then as sister-mother Nikki Giovanni says in “Ego-Tripping”:

We “can fly like a bird in the sky.”

Leonore Tucker is a poet/writer. She studied literature and writing at New School University. She lives in New York but has deep Southern roots.

source: atlantablackstar.com by Yanique Dawkins

3 Comments
So Rah
2/16/2015 05:53:31 am

Great post

Reply
Leon Martel
2/16/2015 04:32:34 pm

This is wonderful info

Reply
JB
2/16/2015 05:22:17 pm

Wow

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    ENJOY YOUR 432 HZ
    "SOUL RNB" VIBE SUITE

    EBONY EYEZ

    Picture
    Click to enter "Ebony Eyez"

    SUPPORT DROP NATION!

    Picture
    SUPPORT DROP NATION
    PAYPAL 4 THE DROP

    DROP LIBRARY

    Picture
    ENTER DROP LIBRARY

    ROCK DA DROP

    ORDER YOUR DROP NATION SHIRT TODAY!
    Picture
    Picture
    Sizes

    "YES U DO" 
    THE FREQUENCY ANTHEM
    Download Free Now

    SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE TO JOIN DROP NATION VIP!


    Join today and receive your favorite 5 songs re-tuned to 432hz every month! For a limited time only!

    drop tuner

    Upload up to 50 of your favorite songs every month and we'll send them back in 432hz Swag Frequency!
    email us to get started today...
    music@432thedrop.com
    Swag Frequency
    Email

    DAILY DROP

    HOW TO GET STARTED TODAY WITH OUR NEW 432 HERTZ DROP TUNER SERVICE! FREE!!!
    Daily Drop Archives

    LET US FIND THE TRUTH

    VIRTUAL PUBLIC LIBRARY
    Picture
    LETUSFINDTHETRUTH

    LATEST LIVE ON-AIR SHOWS

    TDR | THE BOILING POINT
    Picture

    Click button below to open live shows in a separate browser for uninterrupted streaming.
    SHOW ARCHIVES

    WHO GOT THE DROP? 
    HIRAM ART


    DONATE TO FIGHT SICKLE CELL

    Picture
    Donate to Camp Crescent Moon today and help our children fight Sickle Cell
    Donate Today!

    Categories

    All
    420 Drop
    432 Drop
    432 Live Radio Shows
    #ADD Drop
    Album Drop
    Alden Davis
    Animal Drop
    Art Drop
    Arthur Scott Jr
    Artists Lounge
    Book Drop
    Brandy Brim Show
    Bro Sanchez Tv
    Business Drop
    Chef Ahki
    Classic Drop
    Community Drop
    Compare 432 Vs 440
    Cool Drop
    Cop Drop
    Cynthia G
    Daily Drop
    Daughter Of Israel
    Drop Albums
    Drop Artist Battles
    Drop Artist Features
    Drop Artists
    Drop Artist Vids
    Drop Beats
    Drop Exclusive
    Drop Freestyle
    Drop Interviews
    Drop Kicks
    Drop Library
    Drop Nation
    Drop Or Die
    Drop Poetry
    Drop Producer Battles
    Drop Producer Features
    Drop Tracks
    Drop Vidz
    Drop Whips
    Drop Writers
    Dry Bones Rising
    Education Drop
    Ernest Anderson
    Faith Drop
    Fashion Drop
    Fight Drop
    Film/tv Drop
    Fitness Drop
    Flat Drop
    Food Drop
    Food Truck Drop
    Francisco
    Funny Drop
    Galactic Drop
    Gamer Drop
    Geoshifter
    Getting To Root Of It All
    Grimnasty Tv
    Hallway Ch
    Health Drop
    Hiram Art
    Historic Drop
    Hood2hood1000
    Hurt Beezy
    Ig45n2
    Immanuel Hizkiyah
    Industry Drop
    Infinite Waters
    Irvin Reed
    J Stew
    Kaptain Kush
    Kiddie Drop
    King Drane
    King Drop
    Kotaku
    Legal Drop
    Let Us Find The Truth
    Lexwill
    Life Drop
    Live Drop
    Lord Of The Universe13
    Madison Smilez
    Ma Truth
    Medicine Man
    Misc Drop
    M Mitchell
    Money Drop
    Multi Drop
    Mw Smith
    Mz Dee And Copper Color Awakenig
    Naija Drop
    Negrito Grande
    News Drop
    Oktoba Skorpio
    Phi Yah
    Photo Drop
    Political Drop
    Prof Spira
    Racing Drop
    Rara The Great
    Real Spill
    Rest In Power
    Rfg Chosen One
    Scattered Yasharal Views
    Science Drop
    Secret Drop
    Seed Drop
    Short Film Drop
    Sister Drop
    Sneaker Drop
    Space Drop
    SPORTS DROP
    Style Drop
    Styles By Nina
    Suit Up
    Survival Drop
    Tayla Andre
    Tbt Drop
    Teachmetobepriestly
    TECH DROP
    Thee Original American
    Tmel Ra Smith Bey
    Top Drop
    Tree Drop
    Truthunveiled777
    Tyrone St
    Underwater Drop
    Unidentified Drop
    Uno Onthebeatz
    Wake Up With Mr Pete
    War Drop
    Watch Drop
    Weather Drop
    Wildlife Drop
    Winnifer Holcolb
    Word Drop
    World Drop
    Wtf Drop
    Yahunathon


    ENJOY our latest DROP ARTIST and PRODUCER features!

    SUPPORT INDIE ARTISTS!

    ARTIST FEATURES
    PROD. FEATURES

    LAST SHOW'S PLAYLIST ENJOY YOUR 432HZ "SWAG FREQUENCY" EXPERIENCE.
    SHOW PLAYLISTS

    CYMATICS EXPERIMENT
    432HZ VS 440HZ


    WHAT IS 432 HZ?

    Follow @432thedrop

    Picture
    Picture

    The Drop is Cutting Edge Frequency
    The Drop
    is Knowledge
    The Drop is Power!


    DROP QUOTE
    "TRUTH NEVER NEEDS VALIDATION FROM IGNORANCE"
    - DICK GREGORY


    VIBE SUITE

    What vibe suits you?
    Pick your own 432Hz Healthy Music VIBE & enjoy your travels through wonderland...

    DROP FLOW


    LADY'S LOVE


    THE BASEMENT


    MAKE ME WORK IT


    MEDITATE WITH ME


    LET'S GET JAZZY


    Picture

    THE DROPOFF

    Vibrate with King Drop  dropping the latest indie music, drop topics and exclusive interviews!
    LIVE SHOWS RETURNING SOON!!!!!!


    Archives

    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    December 1969

    RSS Feed


Copyright 43.2 The Drop Radio, LLC