…………did he win/lose because of, or despite, this song? LOL! 🙂
Below is what he looked like when he beat Adam Clayton Powell.
And now:
And here’s a timeline.
…..as long as Stephen Moffat keeps the quasi-promise he makes here. 🙂
………….I found this a GREAT idea! They’ll make $5 million for sure, now! (Although they were going to, anyway 🙂 )
For some reason, I’ve become obsessed recently with the LYRICS to “Star Trek: TOS.” It’s a little known fact. Here they are (and good going, whichever fan sang this 🙂 ):
Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand’ring in star-flight
I know
He’ll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.
I’m really having a hard time remembering TV before ME-TV. 🙂
My two cents: Oprah’s eulogy was powerful, but understandably restrained.
FLOTUS’ was beautifully crafted.
I wanted Cicely Tyson to keep going.
As former President Bill Clinton said, she lived so many lifetimes that all the speakers could show up and talk about just a part of her life. Unfortunately, virtually nothing of the political Maya was mentioned, other than a brief mention of the Harlem Writer’s Guild, her work in Ghana, and knowing Malcolm X. And most of that was done by Clinton, not the Black speakers! LOL! 🙂
Below is from “Democracy Now!”:
SONIA SANCHEZ: It’s going being her sister, Amy, and you are right, it is a very sad occasion, but anytime I can hear and see her perform, you know that she will live forever. I first met Sister Maya in the 1960’s. That was period when we were all gathering together to change the world. I saw her on a couple of occasions at affairs where we all read our poetry. I most especially remember her in the play “The Blacks.” She came out in her tall, six feet majesty, and you were just stricken by her, by her beauty and by her grace. And I still have in my memory, when Lumumba was killed, Louise Meriwether and Sister Maya, climbing, going over the walls there at the U.N. They were protesting. To have seen that, you stood there in awe.
AMY GOODMAN: The first president of the Congo.
SONIA SANCHEZ: Yes, Lumumba.
AMY GOODMAN: The democratically elected president of the Congo.
SONIA SANCHEZ: It was an amazing moment to see the resistance that they were doing there in New York City at the U.N.
The post below, showing a conversation between Dave Chappelle and Maya Angelou, show the “realness” of her much more than the soft-shoe funeral did.
Wow! From 2006.
Maya Angelou is being memorialized as I write this. This video from 1977, from one of Richard Pryor’s television specials (before he got a very short-lived and controversial show), has been making the Web rounds.
A Woman Called MAYA: 1928 – 2014
[col. writ. 5/28/14] © ’14 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Maya Angelou had to be the name of a poet; for it is too perfect, too lyrical to fit any other personality.
Born on April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, MO., she blazed an incandescent streak across the heavens as a voice of memory, as poet, actress, author and activist. She taught generations of students as an honored professor of literature. As a young woman she struck the boards as an African dancer.
And she was a close friend and colleague of Malcolm X, working briefly as a leading member of his post-Nation of Islam grouping, the Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU).
During the early ‘60s presidency of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana attracted activists from around the world, especially Black Americans. Maya Angelou would be among them, making Western Africa her home.
There she would meet Malcolm again, tanned dark by the African sun, goateed, and fresh from his Hajj to Mecca, appearing at her door.
The assassination of Malcolm X seemed to have marked a turning point in her life, for it seemed like the work of “crazy people”, she said.
She got a call while visiting a relative in San Francisco, and the news of Malcolm’s fate numbed her into shock.
Her brother appeared at the house, unbidden, and drove her away. As they walked the city’s Black district – then the Fillmore – the conversations being heard around them were about Malcolm – but decidedly negative: “ ‘[H]e got what he deserved,” said one; “Serves him right”, said another.
Her brother turned to her and said, “These are the people that he died for.”
She would thereafter write, mother, teach and mentor.
Her autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, a tale of childhood betrayal, vengeance, and death, would be joined by works of poetic wonder, light and hope.
Her majestic contralto would lend Presidential Inauguration nobility if did not deserve, when she delivered “On the Pulse of the Morning”, reciting:
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again. (1993)
It seemed more fitting for her own extraordinary life.
She is the mother of the brilliant novelist, Guy Johnson.
-© ‘14maj
Drums in the Global Village 