'Left of Black': Episode #24 featuring Pierre & Jamyla Bennu and Rebecca Walker

Left of Black Episode # 24

w/Pierre & Jamyla Bennu & Rebecca Walker

March 7, 2011

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Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker and conceptual artist Pierre Bennu and his partner Jamyla Bennu. Latter writer Rebecca Walker joins Neal, also via Skype, from her home in Hawaii.

→Pierre Bennu is a filmmaker and conceptual artist. Among his work is the full length film Red Bone Guerillas (2003) and film shorts including “Sun Moon Child” (2007) and the “Black Moses Barbie” (2011) series. Bennu is also the author of BS or Fertilizer. Bennu runs the small business, Oyin Handmade, making natural skin and hair care products and the production company ExittheApple.com with his wife and partner Jamyla Bennu.

→Rebecca Walker is an award-winning speaker, teacher, and bestselling author. She presents ideas about race, class, culture, gender, and the evolution of the human family that challenge ideological rigidity and encourage fresh approaches to enduring conflicts. Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential leaders of her generation. Walker is the author of two memoirs, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of the Shifting Self (2002) and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (2008).


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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.

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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