Letters to Editor

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones  /  Biblical Scholars   /  ChickenBones Interviews  /  Depression Shopping List

Your Whiteness is Showing (Tim Wise )

Lingering Issues in Achebe’s Female Characterisation (Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye)

Book Discussion: The Beautiful Struggle (video): Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates reads passages

Nuking Nagasaki & Hiroshima, Our Nuking Nevada / / Like a Tortoise Shell  / Asa G. Hilliard III Obituary 

Apartheid dead but racism endures—Under apartheid, black education was purposely substandard and certain skilled jobs, notably in big corporations such as the railroad, were reserved for whites. Now white South Africans complain about government affirmative action programs that work against them. Yet despite these programs and a booming economy, more blacks are out of work than under white rule. Government statistics show that 10 percent of black households are in the top income bracket compared with 65 percent of white households. Blacks are 85 percent of the 48 million population. President Thabo Mbeki hoped business friendly policies would create a trickle-down effect, but they didn’t, and many blacks criticize Mbeki for leaving the reins of the economy in white hands. Yahoo News

  The Exhilarating Generosity of Asa Hilliard  / Slow Death in Gaza (Margaret Kimberley)

      “Djimbe Danse”  Artwork (left) by Chuck Siler

Send  a Gift to ChickenBones: A Journal  — Perform a Selfless & Commited Act Give a New Gift Book — Support Writers & Poets     

Only one copy of each title now available (except where indicated):  — Donations at all levels welcomed

Will Americans Ever Learn–I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves. . . . Again, there’s no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We’ll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.—Seymour Hersh, Interview Spiegel Online (28 September 2007)     What Black Men Think (Film, 2007)

The Sultan Poets The Royal Poets of Turkey Translations by Mevlut Ceylan

Keep Things In Perspective, Be Thankful (Junious Ricardo Stanton)

Visionary Chris Hedges Issues Dire Warning

about America’s Impending Demise in Lecture By Kam Williams

Akoli Penoukou:  Love One Another / The Ancestors Are Not Really Dead  /  Into His Arms  / On Learning of Walter Rodney’s Death & Other Poems 

Iraqi police get motivational speech by Army solider.

 Iraqi police strike fear with rape and beating

Criminalizing a Race: Blacks and Prisons

Gun Violence: The American Way—Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, we pay no attention to this relentless carnage. The idea of doing something meaningful about the insane number of guns in circulation is a nonstarter. So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes. The goal of the National Rifle Association and a host of so-called conservative lawmakers is to get ever more guns into the hands of ever more people. Texas is one of a number of states considering bills to allow concealed guns on college campuses. Supporters argue, among other things, that it will enable students and professors to defend themselves against mass murderers, like the deranged gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech two years ago. They’d like guns to be as ubiquitous as laptops or cellphones. One Texas lawmaker referred to unarmed people on campuses as “sitting ducks.” NYTimes

The Exhilarating Generosity of Asa Hilliard

On the Passing of Asa Hilliard

Asa Hilliard Obituary  / If I Ain’t African

Pan-African Nationalism in the Americas 

  Akoli Penoukou:

Love One Another  / The Ancestors Are Not Really Dead

Out of the Clouds  /  Into His Arms 

 Eighty Moods of Maya  / Images and Homages: “Memwars”    Two Decades of Drumvoices Revue

Rivera files: Islam and the West: Competing Fundamentalisms  / Lest We Forget Killens  /  Inside the river of poetry  / Puerto Rican Sovereignty  

GreatThingsHappenin’    Louis Reyes Rivera Interview /  Scattered Scripture   / Mickey  /   Inside the river of poetry/ 

Support Writers Guild of America Strike  Louisreyesrivera@aol.com

ChickenBones Black Arts and Black Power Figures (Compiled by Rudolph Lewis)

 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Pgae / Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story (video)

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Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond

Eighty Moods of Maya  / Images and Homages: “Memwars”

DrumVoices Revue

Dudley Randall—Publisher, Editor, Poet

April is National Poetry Month

Unity’s all we ask and need

For Rudy Lewis

By Richard Lawson

Media Crisis and Grassroots Response By Jordan Flaherty

 Jena Ignites a Movement   K-Ville Cop TV Show  

World Social Forum Diary 

Leadership without a Moral Purpose (Victor E. Dike)

Why . . . Send . . . Money to Ras Baraka  (Amiri Baraka)

Atlanta Constitution on Race Problem    Origin of Segregation     Intermarriage a No-No     

  Who Wants Integration      The Problem of Integration      The Racial Problem

Brother West: Living and Loving Ou Loud: A memoir (Cornel West)

The House at Sugar Beach . . . Lost African Childhood (Helene Cooper)

Notes to a Diabetic (from Ben Schwartz)

Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye — Will Obasanjo Explode Yar’Adua’s Anti-Graft Balloon?  Who Cares If Kenya Bleeds To Death?

Obasanjo’s Probe: Mr. Ribadu’s Redeeming Job  / In Nigeria, Yar’Adua Reigns, Obasanjo Rules  / Dinner From A Lagos Dustbin  Global News: Politics

Commentary on ChickenBones—I want to say that you have given a wonderful gift to humankind by establishing and maintaining ChickenBones.  In the history of African American journals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I rank your magazine with Negro Digest/Black World, which was “blessed” to have the financial backing of Johnson Publications. It is required reading for people who wish to be informed about the trajectories of thought in the contemporary world.  It is a dynamic, growing textbook that ought to be used in courses on African American literature and culture.  I am using it as an external link for the course I teach this semester on the Foundations of African American Literature.  My students need to know that academic journals do not tell us everything. So, thank you Rudy for your gift to black folks and everybody else. Peace and brotherhood, Jerry Ward, Jr. (24 August 2008)