Marley & Me

Above:Bob Marley in the fall of 1976 in front of his house at 23rd and Tatnall streets in Wilmington. (Photo courtesy of the Pitts family.) It’s the night before Woodstock, almost 40 years ago, and a 24-year-old Bob Marley is in Wilmington. He’s up late, helping his new friend Ibis Pitts make the homemade jewelry that he was taking north to New York the next day to sell at the music festival. And as Marley helps, Ibis is trying to persuade the future reggae icon to come with him to the festival, which also would become part of music legend.

“I was all excited about going up there,” Ibis remembers. “We stayed up all night doing that and he still wouldn’t go. He kept a very low, low profile. I later got him to go with me one time to see my mother in New Jersey and I was so happy he did that.”

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The African Diaspora in Europe

The history of the African Diaspora in Europe is still largely misunderstood and has not received much recent academic attention. It originated tens of thousands of years ago when human society, in the modern sense, first came into being. During this time, several waves of men and women from the African continent had begun to migrate to Europe [..]

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Slave Ship Peter Mowell

On July 25, 1860, after thirty-six days of sailing from the Congo River in Africa, the Peter Mowell, an illegally operating slave ship, ran aground on Lynyard Cay in the Abaco chain of islands. This 129 ton schooner was en route to Havana, Cuba with a human cargo of 400 captive Africans. Having already lost many of its sails, the slaver wrecked as it attempted to evade what it believed to be a British Navy man-of-war. The ship crew and at least 390 of the 400 Africans made it safely ashore the uninhabited and inhospitable Lynyard Cay. The ship itself was left to disintegrate on the rocks.

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Detroit and Iraq: Both Devastated by the Same Thieves

The ugly face of empire and disaster capitalism is visible all over the world. Detroit, Michigan, was once a thriving city but was sent into a tailspin by the deindustrialization of the United States, white flight, and institutional racism which blamed black people who were in fact the victims of catastrophe. The coup de grace was delivered by big banks like UBS, Bank of America and Barclays, which sold risky derivatives schemes to corrupt Detroit politicians [3]. When the financial deal inevitably headed south, the banks were the creditors first in line for a payout. [ .. ]

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Amma Asante's film Belle introduces audiences to 18th-century London's thriving black community

In 1780, The Gentleman's Magazine published a brief obituary of a Westminster grocer. Shopkeepers did not often attract the honour of notice in the society journals of Georgian London, but this one had, thanks to his wit, warmth and bonhomie, got to know an extraordinary range of writers, artists and politicians [..]

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Black Power in Brazil Means Natural Hair

The message of black pride circulated at the parties, often with translations that emphasized “the commonalities of struggle among various African-descended populations, despite linguistic, cultural and regional differences,” writes Michael G. Hanchard, a professor of Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, in a blog for Northwestern University’s Institute for Diasporic Studies [..]

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