'Left of Black': Episode #20 featuring Bakari Kitwana and Kyra Gaunt

Left of Black #20
w/Bakari Kitwana & Kyra Gaunt
February 7, 2011

In this 20th installment of Left of Black, host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by author, political analyst and activist Bakari Kitwana in a conversation about the current media landscape. Neal also talks with Baruch College Professor and 2009 TED Fellow Kyra D. Gaunt whose recent essay Black Twitter, Combating the New Jim Crow & the Power of Social Networking examines the social justice potential of Social Media.

→Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst. He’s currently senior editor of newsone.com, the internet news presence of Radio One. He’s also the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which conducts town hall meetings around the country on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation. Kitwana is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabees and the New Reality of Race in America (2005).

→Kyra D. Gaunt is a trained ethnomusicologist and classical singer who teaches the study of African American music, cultural anthropology, hip-hop, race and gender studies. A 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow, Gaunt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College. She is the author of The Games Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2007)

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?

The use of social media in support of Kelley Williams-Bolar recalls the spirit of the Greensboro sit-ins 51 years ago.

What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

February 1st marks the anniversary of what I like to refer to as one of the greatest days in American History. On that day in 1960, four young Black men—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond—all first year students at HBCU North Carolina A&T, sat at a Whites only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, N.C.

This protest—formally known as a sit-in—began weeks of similar protests, that went viral throughout the American South in ways that mirror the functions of today’s social media. The Greensboro sit-ins are widely remembered as the moment of activism that gave renewed energy and vigor to a Civil Rights Movement that was sputtering after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The Greensboro Four, of course, did not have access to social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but nevertheless utilized what would have been the accessible technology of the days like land-lines and good-old fashion word of mouth. For those young folk, who would months after Greensboro, go on to create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the watchful eye of Ella Jo Baker, understood technology, including television, as simply one of the tools they employed to make their case.

Civil Rights activists brilliantly exploited television cameras, helping to bring the marches in the streets straight into the living rooms of average Americans, whether they wanted to see it or not. Many activists from the era point to the role that televised footage of young Black Americans being hosed down and attacked by police dogs played in generating sympathy for a nation that had been largely indifferent.

The spirit of the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and the role that technology played during that time have been recalled in recent weeks with regards to the Georgia Prison Strike, the senseless conviction of Kelley Williams-Bolar, and the widespread protests taking place in Tunisia and Egypt.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21