Harry Belafonte gets fired up over Obama while speaking at St. Sabina

BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA, Staff Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times

February 13, 2012 1:32AM

Part of a Black History Month program that also brought Princeton Professor Cornel West to the South Side church on Sunday, Belafonte, espousing incendiary views on racism and capitalism for six decades, did not hold back during his presentation Friday night.

Criticism of President Barack Obama’s bailout of Wall Street banks, comparison of the Occupy America movement to the 1960s civil rights battle, and an urging of African Americans and the poor toward an uprising to alleviate racism and poverty were among topics covered by an 84-year-old luminary who has sat with many of the world’s heads of state.

“I find myself at this time of my life with a lot of questions I thought we had answered,” said Belafonte, who was born in Harlem, N.Y. in 1927, was the first African-American man ever to win an Emmy Award and was a key confidant to Martin Luther King Jr.

“The last time I saw Dr. King, he had come to our home in New York, which was not uncommon as we plotted strategies for campaigns we were waging, and he was in a surly mood,” Belafonte told some 1,000 who braved a snowstorm to hear him.

“King said, ‘We have fought long and hard for the goals we’ve achieved, but therein lies my deepest concern, that in this struggle for integration, which we are achieving, I do genuinely believe that we will be integrating into a burning house,’’ Belafonte said.

“I never understood how prophetic that was until subsequent history revealed itself.”

Deeply entrenched in the civil rights movement, Belafonte was a friend who would bail King out of jail, and who, with such notables as Julian Bond, John Lewis and Dick Gregory, founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

So many of the gains of that movement have been lost, he charged, ticking off decimated and disinvested inner-city communities devoid of a middle class; continuing disparities yielding low funding of public education and high incarceration rates of minority youth; and high poverty and unemployment rates that still more greatly afflict minorities.

“But for all the battles that we’ve won, we have yet not won the war,” Belafonte said.

In 1960, he was named cultural adviser to the Peace Corps, and in 1987, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He has earned worldwide recognition for his dedicated work on behalf of African children stricken by poverty and HIV/AIDS, as well as his outspoken advocacy for the poor and oppressed across the globe.

And when I’m accused of dishonorably criticizing our president, somebody has tried to turn this into a personal affair,” Belafonte said of his more recent criticisms of Obama’s economic policies. “I like Barack Obama. I think he’s a nice young man. There’s a lot about him that fills me with a sense of pride. His presence as president of the United States of America means that we did something right in the civil rights movement.

“But all of these truths do not exempt him from the moral responsibility that he has in his governance of this country. What Dr. King taught us was that without an angry people, without the poor rising up in indignation against their conditions, our leaders will never be pushed to do what they must do.”

A World War II U.S. Navy veteran, Belafonte found work as a local club singer to pay for acting classes in the late 1940s but instead found music his calling. His breakthrough 1956 album, “Calypso,” was the first LP ever in history to sell more than 1 million copies. A prolific actor as well as singer by the late 1950s, he won the Emmy for his 1959 TV special, “Tonight with Harry Belafonte.” He was the organizer of the multi-artist recording, “We Are the World,” which won the 1985 Grammy Award for record of the year and raised millions for emergency famine and health aid to Africa, and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1994.

“When I look at young people in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and hear, ‘Why don’t they go get a job?’ I think, where have I heard that before? When we gathered in the early days of our own rebellion, they said, ‘Why don’t you all go smoke a joint somewhere and get lost?’ ” Belafonte said. “What we’re facing now is an opportunity among young people trying desperately to find their way. The pundits say, ‘Where are their leaders?’ Their leaders are found in history. ‘What do they want?’ Take a look at what we wanted, and you’ll find it’s the same menu. What’s missing is that rage.”

http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=226

By Sid Holmes

Keith Russell

Smooth brown skin, mustache, closely cropped hair and outfitted from head to toe in black boots, jeans, shirt and leather jacket, Keith Russell could be any ordinary urban African American male.

But just as Russell’s appearance belies his age – he looks 15 years younger – it also offers no clue to his occupation, which is worthy of stumping even the savviest panelist on the old game show ‘What’s My Line?’

As an ornithologist (a “birder” in the parlance of the profession) his stock and trade are our feathered friends that most of us barely notice, save for a brief listen to a chirp, a song or a passing glance as they fly to and fro.

The oldest of seven siblings, two boys and five girls, Russell has been enamored of birds for as long as he can remember while growing up in Philadelphia. But the spark leading him to his current a job as Science and Outreach coordinator for Audubon Pennsylvania was struck by a third grade book report. “All I remember is going to the library and looking at bird books,” he smiles.

His parents – father, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and USDA research chemist, and a Temple-grad, stay-at-home mother – did their best to encourage their son, supplying Russell with a pair of Sears binoculars, buying him watercolors to paint his obsession, and occasionally ferrying him to locations where he could observe birds in their various habitats.

“Education was extremely important to my parents,” Russell says, rattling off a list of activities punctuating his childhood, including art lessons and music school. “They supplemented what I learned in school with as much education as they could.”

By the sixth grade Russell was a regular visitor at the Academy of Natural Sciences (the nation’s oldest natural history museum), finding a mentor in a member of the exhibits department, and selling his own paintings of birds to his Mt. Airy neighbors.

A man living literally around the corner from his home, “one of the most well known and well-respected birders in Philadelphia,” took Russell on field trips throughout the region and to meetings of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club (DVOC), America’s oldest organization for birders and bird enthusiasts.

“I burned up his phone,” Russell says, recalling his neighbor’s patience, and how constant reinforcement was instrumental in guiding him towards his career path. “Mentors and parental support, that translates no matter who you are; you connect with a community and that was everything to me.”

At 17, Russell joined the DVOC, the first black member of an organization that at the time had a no-admittance policy for women. Upon high school graduation and fueled by scholarships, he entered Cornell University based on the “tremendous reputation” of its Lab of Ornithology, pursuing a degree in biology and setting the stage for a master’s degree in zoology from Clemson University.

Returning to Philadelphia, for ten years and based on a tip from his museum mentor who suggested that he apply for the position, Russell worked as Collection Manager for Exhibits at the Academy of Natural Sciences, then joined the ornithology department as Assistant Editor for ‘The Birds of North America,’ a publication compiling modern life history information for over 700 species of North American birds.

Russell’s past 11 years have involved conservation activities with the National Audubon Society, first as a biologist in its science office for the Important Bird Area Program and, since 2006, in his current Philadelphia-based position, spreading the gospel of habitat preservation and restoration, in collaboration with other organizations like the city’s zoo.

Most recently he’s been involved in a research project about bird collisions with buildings. (They are fooled by reflections in windows.) For three years Russell has monitored a three-and-a-half square block area of Center City dominated by skyscrapers, documenting numerical and species data on the hundreds of birds killed annually during the spring and fall migration periods.

“If you’re a birder, you’re naturally interested in conservation,” Russell points out, adding that his fellow bird lovers share a simple rationale for devoting their lives to studying their subjects. “There’s something about them that they find fascinating. Birds are beautiful creatures.”

Being engaged in a profession where African Americans are few and far between is nothing new to Russell. “You get used to it, like it’s no big deal,” he says, noting that for high school he and his siblings all attended the private Germantown Friends School, and are grads of Brown, Penn, Princeton, etc. They enjoy careers in teaching, marketing, banking and more. “I didn’t find that funny,” he says of his life’s journey. “My parents had us all understand that all people are equal and there are no ‘special’ children.”

He gives all the credit for his and his siblings’ success to his parents who did not constrain their interests – even if they did not understand their children’s passions. “They allowed each of us to be who we were. They are the most important reason why I am able to do this today,” he says, adding that their experience holds an example for today’s parents, whose children have an array of career choices they can imagine and pursue – if they prepare themselves.

“We as black folks need to have a broader range of interests if each one of us is going to find a niche in life that allows us to utilize and be appreciated for the unique talents we all possess as individuals. Not everybody can rap, play basketball or cut hair.”