Respect where it's due: BM/WW IR in History

[Silvercosma]

Dr Allan Aubrey Boesak and his wife Elna Botha

Reverend Allan Aubrey Boesak was president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and a founder of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a leading antiapartheid movement in the 1980s.
During his college and seminary years he began to react against racial segregation and what he called 'ecclesiastical colonialism', the paternalistic and racist attitudes of the Reformed churches. He was a key member of the Broederkring, the 'Brothers' Circle' of Reformed clergy, which was dedicated to shaping the Reformed churches into an antiapartheid force. In 1981 he was elected as the first president of the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians, which rejected racism, asserted the right and duty of Christians to be involved in politics, and denied the divine institution of state. The following year, at an Ottawa, Canada, meeting of the WARC, he proposed a condemnation of apartheid as heretical to the Gospel and a betrayal of Reformed tradition. After its passage and his election as president of the WARC, the two white Reformed bodies in South Africa (which supported apartheid) were expelled from membership. The actions of the WARC struck at the heart of apartheid ideology, which was based on a biblical justification of racial separatism.

In 1983, Boesak called for the unity of all antiapartheid groups in South Africa to oppose the new constitution of President P. W. Botha, which established Indian and Coloured houses of parliament but excluded blacks. This exclusion led to the formation of the UDF, an umbrella group of more than 700 organizations that became the legal opposition during the period when African political organizations were banned. In 1984, Boesak was elected president of the South African Council of Churches (SACC). He was arrested in 1986 for demonstrating for the release of jailed African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela but was released on bail. Charges were later dropped.

Boesak also became a tireless campaigner overseas against apartheid. A 1984 trip was instrumental in stiffening opposition to apartheid by the Australian government. He went to Zambia in 1985 to meet with Oliver Tambo, exiled head of the ANC, and Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's president and leader of the Frontline States. In 1985 and 1986 he visited the United States, Switzerland, Thailand, and Sweden.

In 1986, Boesak, Naudé, and Bishop Desmond Tutu formed a delegation of church leaders to discuss with President Botha the violent protests in the African townships outside of South Africa's urban centers. Their discussions had no effect, and in 1988 the UDF was banned. The UDF then led demonstrations in a mass defiance campaign against the emergency regulations of 1989, but the election of F. W. De Klerk as state president that year opened doors to reform. The ANC and other groups were no longer banned, and Mandela and the ANC leadership were freed from prison. Just as these events took place, Boesak went into political eclipse after it was revealed that he was having an affair with a promiment white television producer, Elena Botha, the niece of a hard-line apartheid cabinet minister. Boesak was forced to resign from his church and as president of the WARC. He and his wife subsequently divorced, and he has married Elena Botha. He led the ANC in the 1994 elections in the Western Cape Province and emerged as leader of the opposition in the provincial legislature. Read more here

 

[nobledruali]

Thank you again nobledruali! Without your feedback I probably would have dropped this thread already -- it seems that we two are the only ones interested in it ...

I still have a few names. I will post them one by one whenever I'm in the mood to look them up and copy their biographies.

Please do so as I'm sure others are enjoying them as well. :wink:

PS>It seems you're doing the real meaningful stuff whereas I like to cover the celeb IR couple stuff :!: It's somewhat of a hobby of mine since I joined this site. 8)

 

[Silvercosma]

Yes, we complement one another, don't we?

Together, we cover the whole IR spectrum! I like that!!

 

[Silvercosma]

Here is another one:

Henry Sylvester Williams and his wife Agnes Powell
(Couldn't find a picture of Agnes)

Henry Sylvester Williams was a Trinidadian Pan-Africanist and lawyer who organized the world's first ever pan-African conference. Williams influenced W E B Du Bois, who participated in the 1900 conference and who has come to be known as the father of modern Pan-Africanism. In fact, in his writings, Du Bois claims he came up with the Pan African idea. His famous Address to the Nations with its prophetic statement "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line" came to be regarded as the defining statement of the conference, but the idea for the conference and the association came from Williams. Williams vision to bring people of African descent closer together, and establish a movement for rights and privileges is a legacy that lasts today.

Williams established in 1897 the African Association. The following year he issued a statement calling for a conference "in order to take steps to influence public opinion on existing proceedings and conditions affecting the welfare of the natives in the various parts of the Empire, viz., South Africa, West Africa and the British West Indies". After a meeting with Booker T. Washington Williams decided to increase the scope of the conference by also looking at "the treatment of native races under European and American rule".

The Pan-African Conference was held at Westminster Town Hall in July 1900. There were 37 delegates from Europe, Africa and the United States. Those attending included Samuel Coleridge Taylor, John Alcindor, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Archer and William Du Bois. At the conference a large number of delegates made speeches where they called for governments to introduce legislation that would ensure racially equality. Michael Creighton, the Bishop of London, asked the British government to confer the "benefits of self-government" on "other races as soon as possible".

After the conference the Pan-African Congress wrote to Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, suggesting that black people in the British Empire should be granted "true civil and political rights". Chamberlain replied that black people were "totally unfit for representative institutions". Williams responded to this by writing to Queen Victoria about the system "whereby black men, women, and children were placed in legalized bondage to white colonists". The letter was passed to Chamberlain who replied that the government would not "overlook the interests and welfare of the native races." In 1901 Williams travelled the world and managed to set-up branches of the Pan-African Congress in the United States, Jamaica and Trinidad. In October, 1901, Williams established the journal The Pan African. He explained in the first edition that the main objective of the journal was to support the "interests of the African and his descendants in the British Empire". Williams added that in his opinion "that no other but a Negro can represent the Negro".

Williams was called to the bar in June 1902 and therefore became the first barrister of African descent to practise in Britain. Over the next few years he spent a lot of time defending black people involved in the campaign against racial prejudice in South Africa. He also spent time in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Williams joined the Fabian Society and in November 1906 he and John Archer became the first people of African descent to be elected to public office in Britain. Williams won a seat on Marylebone Borough Council whereas Archer won in Battersea.

During his time in London in 1896, Williams fell in love with a white Englishwoman, Agnes Powell. She was a member of the Temperance Society, and her father was Captain Francis Powell, who strongly objected to their union and refused to give his consent to marry. She ignored her father’s objections, and went on to marry Williams in 1898, They had five children, the first Henry Francis Sylvester was born the following year, his last child George was born after his death in 1911.
Read more here and here

 

[madscientist]

Thank you again nobledruali! Without your feedback I probably would have dropped this thread already -- it seems that we two are the only ones interested in it ...

I am also very interested in this thread and hope that you don't drop it.

 

[LaydeezmanCris]

Wow, Silver. , it's scary how you know all of this. I read a lot and i'd be lying if i told you i knew as many notable interracial couples as you did/do. Don't get the impression that we are not interested in this thread; we most certainly are. I don't know as much as you do so i'm just sitting back and let you do the talking and teaching. Kudos to you, Silver.

Now keep teaching us. :wink: :wink:

 

[nobledruali]

Yes, we complement one another, don't we?

Together, we cover the whole IR spectrum! I like that!!

:wink: Sounds good to me :!:

 

[Silvercosma]

Thank you all for the feedback!!!

...so I will keep on keepin on ...

Here is another couple ...

Cyril Lionel Robert James and his wife Constance Webb

Constance Webb was an actress, model, writer, political activist, friend and first biographer of Richard Wright

Cyril Lionel Robert James was a journalist, socialist theorist, Pan-Africanist, political activist and writer, his political and literary activities extended over five decades and several countries - including Trinidad, Britain, the United States and Ghana.

In 1933, James moved to London. James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad, and his Life of Captain Cipriani and the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government were his first important published works, but now he became a leading champion of Pan-African agitation and the Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, formed in 1935 in response to Fascist Italy's invasion of what is now Ethiopia. He then became a leading figure in the International African Service Bureau, led by his childhood friend George Padmore through which he later met Kwame Nkrumah. In Britain, he also became a leading Marxist theorist. He had joined the Labour Party, but in the midst of the Great Depression became convinced of Trotskyism and in 1934 joined an entrist Trotskyist group inside the Independent Labour Party. In this period, amid his frantic political activity, James wrote a play about Toussaint L'Ouverture, which was staged in the West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson. He also wrote what are perhaps his best-known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian revolution which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the Independent Labour Party to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation and when James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party, then the US section of the Fourth International, in order to facilitate its work among black workers, he was encouraged to leave by one such factional opponent, John Archer, in the hope of removing a rival.

James moved to the US in late 1938 and after a tour sponsored by the SWP stayed on for over twenty years. But by 1940 he had developed severe doubts about Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party. Within the WP he formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym being Johnson and Dunayevskaya's Forest) and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) in order to spread their views within the new party. James would still describe himself as a Leninist, despite his rejection of Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party, and argue for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements.

In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa by over ten years, and returned to Trinidad in 1958 , where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also had become involved again in the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana revolution showed that decolonisation was the most important inspiration for international revolutionaries. Read more here

Almost immediately upon his arrival to the US in 1938, James became acquainted with Webb, an American model and actress 20 years his junior who attended one of his talks in California. Smitten, James initiated a correspondence with her. A long while later, after James divorced his first wife and Webb her second husband, the letters had their desired effect: Webb and James married in 1946.

Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948
Introduction by Anna Grimshaw

In the pages which follow I hope to provide a context for the letters James wrote to a young American woman, Constance Webb, during his first, extended stay in the United States. This remarkable body of writing, hitherto unpublished, is less a record of a relationship, more the spiritual journey of a man unburdening himself to someone he barely knew and yet instinctively trusted.

Through his love for a woman, James found a way to articulate much that gave meaning to his own life and work. His letters to Constance Webb, written over half a century ago, stand as a powerful and profoundly unsettling expression of the complex forces which animated his personality. But more than this, the interplay between James's own individuality and the world in which he lived is uniquely revealed by this correspondence. For the political struggles central to the social revolution of the twentieth century, conflicts of race, class and gender, were mirrored by divisions within James himself; and an understanding of the intense personal battles which he fought within himself illuminates, I believe, the tremendous conflicts of our modern age.

Constance Webb, an aspiring actress and model, met James in the spring of 1939. She was part of the audience in a Los Angeles church for his talk, “The Negro Question,” which he gave toward the end of a nationwide speaking tour. He was en route to his meeting with Trotsky in Mexico; and the first letters to Webb were sent from the exiled revolutionary's headquarters in Coyoacan. They mark the beginning of the correspondence which James pursued for almost a decade. It consists of over two hundred letters, handwritten, often many pages long, sometimes snatched notes jotted down while travelling or during meetings, at other times extended musings on art, love, literature and politics.

The young woman who prompted such an outpouring from James describes herself in an unpublished memoir as a seventh-generation American of western birth and southern parentage. Her parents were from Atlanta, Georgia; and although they lived for many years in California, they could not, according to Webb, escape their deeply rooted southern heritage. Webb, however, became involved early on in socialist politics, developing a particular interest in the race question. She was eighteen when she met James, who was almost twenty years her senior; but she sparked off something profound in him, and her process of self-discovery became inseparable from his own.
James's letters to Webb chart a journey. The correspondence is anchored in the most intimate and personal concerns of two people; but their exploration of the differences between them, differences of race, gender, age and background, open out to encompass questions at the heart of modern civilization. The fact that these letters were written in the New World is not accidental. Indeed it is impossible to imagine James writing them anywhere else. For he experienced America as a moment of freedom. He was freed, if only temporarily, from the weight and claustrophobia of his colonial and European past; and he felt a tremendous surge in his creative powers.

James's internal struggle was inseparable from the intense conflicts which he identified as raging at every level of twentieth-century society. It was what he called in his 1950 work, American Civilization, “the struggle for happiness,” the need to realize the full and free expression of individual personality within new and expanded conceptions of social life.
Read more here

 

[Silvercosma]

And since I already mentioned Richard Wright above, here he is ...

Richard Wright
and his first wife Dhimah Rose Meadman, a Russian-Jewish ballet dancer,
and his second wife, Ellen Poplar

After grade school Wright attended Lanier High School but dropped out after a few weeks to work; he took a series of odd jobs to save enough money to leave for Memphis, which he did at age seventeen. While in Memphis he worked as a dishwasher and delivery boy and for an optical company. He began to read contemporary American literature as well as commentary by H. L. Mencken, which struck him with particular force. As Wright reveals in his autobiography Black Boy, he borrowed the library card of an Irish co-worker and forged notes to the librarian so he could read: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" Determined to leave the South before he would irretrievably overstep the bounds of Jim Crow restrictions on blacks, Wright took the train to Chicago in December 1927.

In 1937 Wright moved to New York City, where he helped start New Challenge magazine and was the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker as well as coeditor of Left Front. Wright's literary career was launched when his short story collection, Uncle Tom's Children (1938), won first prize for the Story magazine contest open to Federal Writer's Project authors for best book-length manuscript. Harper's published this collection with "Fire and Cloud," "Long Black Song," "Down by the Riverside," and "Big Boy Leaves Home"; in 1940 the story "Bright and Morning Star" was added, and the book was reissued. Native Son followed in 1940, the first bestselling novel by a black American writer and the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection by an African-American writer. It sold 215,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication. Native Son made Wright the most respected and wealthiest black writer in America; he was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1941. After Uncle Tom's Children, Wright declared in "How Bigger Was Born" that he needed to write a book that bankers' daughters would not be able to "read and feel good about," that would "be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears"; Native Son is uncompromising.

While Wright made blacks proud of his success, he also made them uncomfortable with the protagonist, Bigger, who is a stereotype of the "brute Negro" they had been trying to overcome with novels of uplift by the "talented tenth" since the Gilded Age. Wright's argument is that racist America created Bigger; therefore, America had better change or more Biggers would be out there. At the end, when Max fails to understand Bigger, who cannot be saved from the electric chair, Wright is faulting the Communist party for not comprehending the black people it relied on for support. (Personally disillusioned with the party, Wright left it in 1942 and wrote an essay published in Atlantic Monthly in 1944 called "I Tried to Be a Communist," which was later reprinted in The God That Failed (1949), a collection of essays by disillusioned ex-Communists.) Native Son continues to be regarded as Wright's greatest novel and most influential book. As a result, he has been called the father of black American literature, a figure with whom writers such as James Baldwin had to contend.

As Wright was rising to prominence, his personal life was going through changes as well. In 1939 he had married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a Russian-Jewish ballet dancer. Wright moved her, her son, her mother, and her pianist to Mexico for a few months and then realized the marriage was not a success. He returned to New York and divorced Dhimah in 1940. In 1941 he married Ellen Poplar, a white woman and Communist party member with whom he had worked and been in love before he married Dhimah. A year later their first daughter was born. Their second daughter was born in Paris in 1949.

In 1946 Wright was invited to France. After he returned to the United States he decided he could no longer tolerate the racism he experienced even in New York City. Married to a white woman and living in the North, he still was not able to buy an apartment as a black man; furthermore, he hated the stares he and his family received on the streets. And he was still called "boy" by some shopkeepers. So in 1947 he moved permanently to France and settled in Paris. Wright never again saw the United States.

During the mid-1950s Wright traveled extensively--to Africa, Asia, and Spain--and wrote several nonfiction works on political and sociological topics. He had helped found Présence Africaine with Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and Alioune Diop during 1946-1948. He spent some time in Ghana and in 1954 published Black Power (a term coined by Wright) to mixed reviews. Black Power concerns itself with the color line in Africa and the new "tragic elite," the leaders of the former colonies.
Read more here

 

[nobledruali]

:idea: Hopefully you guys won't mind me "piggybacking" a lil' as always on our sister Silvercosma's research but she's inspired me to do some of my own concerning CLR JAMES & CONSTANCE WEBB. So here is some info on a couple more of their literary works. Enjoy!
PS>And yes, that's their son NOBBIE for whom the book is named on the cover. :wink:

Book Description
After more than a decade in the United States, the Caribbean writer C. L. R. James ran afoul of McCarthyism in 1953 and was deported. In exile in London, he began to write stories in the form of letters to his four-year-old son “Nobbie,” who remained in the States. Through a distinctive, imaginary, and sometimes absurd cast of characters—Good Boongko, Bad boo-boo-loo, Moby Dick, and Nicholas the worker, among others—these stories explore questions of friendship, conflict, community, ethics, and power in humorous and often ingenious ways; they also stand as a moving testament to a father’s struggle to be a vivid presence in the life of his son despite separation and distance.
Attesting to James’s remarkable gifts as a writer and his unusual talent for engaging wide and diverse audiences, these witty and poignant stories, published here for the first time, are not just for James aficionados. Each story is a delight in its own way, making the book irresistible for children and adults alike.


About the Author
C. L. R. James (1901–89) is the author of Beyond a Boundary, The Black Jacobins, American Civilization, and Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, among other works. Edward Said called him a “centrally important twentieth-century figure,” while Caryl Phillips said, “There is little doubt that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.”

Constance Webb (1918–2005) spent many years working in the publishing industry as an editor and writer. Her correspondence with her husband, C. L. R. James, is the subject of the book Special Delivery. Anna Grimshaw, associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, was C. L. R. James’s research assistant at the end of his life and edited Special Delivery and The C. L. R. James Reader.

From Publishers Weekly
Now in her 80s, Webb reminisces on a life in which she nursed California migrant farm workers, posed for Dal¡ and organized for the Socialist Worker's Party. She financed these activities by working as an actress and model, mingling with people like Walter Winchell and James Baldwin. But the author, who is white, is perhaps best known for her relationships with intellectual black activists and writers Richard Wright and C.L.R. James. She befriended Wright in her 20s and, much later, became his biographer. She began corresponding with James at 19, after hearing him speak about racial politics. While her interest was initially romantic, the two corresponded for nearly a decade before marrying briefly (and having a son together). Clearly, Webb took risks, yet she describes how, as a young woman, she also conformed to norms. Indeed, she obeyed the teenage Socialist boys growing up in Fresno, Calif., who suggested she lose her virginity to her boyfriend because "neither you nor he will be able to concentrate on the most important aspect of your lives-the creation of a Leninist-Trotskyist Party-if either of you is sexually deprived." Webb is a good storyteller, but better editing could have yielded a more powerful social history. She uses little primary source material and doesn't cite interviews with comrades or family members. Webb's memoir ends in the late 1950s when, approaching 40, she questions and separates from the leftist political group she'd long identified with. She struggles with the separation, writing, "there is emotional safety in agreement with others and I was unused to thinking for myself except when dreaming." Readers are left to wonder what happens when Webb does start to think and act for herself.

Review
"Here we read of how a bewitching young woman, fired with every sort of idealism, became a Trotskyist militant in the Fresno area in the hot period of the 1930s and later the lover of that movement's most brilliant and charismatic member, the late C.L.R. James." --Los Angeles Times

 

[Soulthinker]

I learn something every day on this thread. Loved it.

 

[Silvercosma]

wowww... great information, nobledruali!!! Love it!!!

I wonder what the little one is doing today ...

 

[dj4monie]

As long as were talking about tailblazers, how can you forget Quincy Jones????

Not only is he responsible for the sound known as "Pop" by today's standards, he had had hit records in every era of music since he first started playing in bands in the late 50's with Lionel Hampton.

I can't think of anybody else that has been involved with more beautiful white women than HE has -

Former 60's high fashion model Ulla Andersson from Sweden

I couldn't find any good pictures of her, but Im sure if you keep diggin you can find one or two. Anyway she's the mother of Hip Hop producer Quincy Jones the 3rd or QDIII ("To Live And Die In LA" by 2pac is one of his better known jams and he was a in-house producer for Eazy E's Ruthless Records until Easy's death)

If your under 25 or been under a rock, Im sure you know who Peggy Lipton is. She was on the Mod Squad during its entire run.

Their marrage resulted in this lovely lady -

Rashida Jones from The Office on NBC

And Kidada Jones who's been in numorous rap videos...

He was involved for several years with actress Nastassja Kinski and they have a child.

When asked recently on a interview show hosted by Public Ememy front man Chuck D, an person stood up and asked what he did for fun when he wasn't producing music. He said "Man you have no idea how much "fun" I have..."

I think that's the understatement of the cenutry.

Frank Sinatra send QDIII when he was born a $50,000 college savings bond...

Frankie didn't have a problem with black folk, period and its been documented several times. He was one of the "good ones"

Just thought I would add...

 

[nobledruali]

wowww... great information, nobledruali!!! Love it!!!

I wonder what the little one is doing today ...

:idea: I'd bet that he's probably a writer or some type of scholar just like his parents were. :wink:

 

[Silvercosma]

:idea: I'd bet that he's probably a writer or some type of scholar just like his parents were. :wink:

Yeah, I think so too!

 

[Silvercosma]

I found a few pictures !

Quincy Jones and his wife Peggy Lipton

Quincy Jones receives his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Peggy Lipton, his wife at the time, kneels next to him.

Rashida Jones and Peggy Lipton


Quincy Jones and Nastassja Kinski

 

[LaydeezmanCris]

Once again, Silver is at her best again. 8) 8) You're the best.

P.S. Silver, were are you from and do you live here in the U.S.?

 

[nobledruali]

Once again, Silver is at her best again. 8) 8) You're the best.

P.S. Silver, were are you from and do you live here in the U.S.?

Silver is our RESIDENT SCHOLAR & RESEARCHER :!: :wink:

 

[LA]

Quincy sure likes the blondes. I'm with that.

 

[nobledruali]

Some pics of "Q" & Peggy back in the day :arrow: