Bigger Than The Game: The Secret Game

Any story that involves punching holes in the Jim Crow laws of the 1950's and 60's will always get my attention. Any story that involves sports and punching holes in the Jim Crow laws of the 1950's and 60's will doubly get my attention. The story of the famed "Secret Game' between the then North Carolina School for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and the Duke Medical School basketball teams caught my eye earlier today when researching some things for my classes. I knew right away this was something I wanted to learn more about and put here for all our faithful followers.

Movie Review- 42

Robinson Won Rookie Of The Year in 1947

To be honest, I had my doubts about this movie.  When I saw its impending release way back when, my first reaction was it would go one of two ways.  One: yet another glorified rah-rah about someone was far but.  Hollywood would wash it clean of any facts or blow out of proportion a few of the more tasty morsels.  Two: An overly dramatic account of something that by nature was pretty dramatic.  After watching it, I concluded that it was neither. Reviewing 42 might best be done by breaking it down into a couple of different areas.  After all it is a film trying to big things.

Amiri Baraka

The modern poetry world lost one of its most divisive and beloved yesterday as Amiri Baraka died at the age of 79. Known as the father of the Black Arts movement, Baraka was a controversial figure who helped birth the Black Art movement of the late 1960’s and 70’s. Educated at Howard University, drummed out of the Air Force in 1954 for his communist leanings, Baraka went on to publish Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at his Totem Publishing house in the Greenwich Village.

As a publisher, poet, and jazz critic, he was a leading figure in the Beat Generation. His works were widely read in the traditionally high brow, New York literary world as the equal of Kerouac and Ginsberg. After the assignation of Malcolm X, Baraka moved quickly away from the Beat poetry that he was publishing at Totem into the growing Black Nationalism movement. There he firmly embedded himself as its poet laureate. Many of his poems centered on urban life in Harlem during the 1960’s and 70’s focusing on the growing frustrations of African Americans. It was during this period that some of his most controversial poems were published