Fit for God
Best -Selling Author Terry McMillan Explores Challenges of Midlife in 'The Interruption of Everything'
Voice of America News August 31, 2005
Best-selling author Terry McMillan is famous for capturing both the humor and hard realities of life for today's African American women. She wrote about four friends searching for romance in Waiting to Exhale, and about a woman who finds love with a much younger man in How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Now she has published The Interruption of Everything (Viking Penguin), a novel about a woman facing the changes of midlife. The term "midlife crisis" is often used to describe the difficulties men face in their 40s and 50s, as they try to come to terms with fading youth and advancing age. But women have their own kinds of midlife crises, suggests Terry McMillan in her new book. More...
African American Library in Florida Promotes Cultural Understanding
VOA News January 17, 2005
The South Florida area around the cities of Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach is home to millions of immigrants from around the world. Many of those immigrants are from the Caribbean, and when they moved to South Florida, they joined a large community of African-Americans who have lived in the area since settlers began arriving in the 19th century. Bringing those different cultures together has never been easy, but in the past few years' one institution has taken the lead in promoting cross-cultural understanding, both in the Black community and across South Florida.
A library aid plays an old record of a recording of blues singer Billie Holiday. The recording is just one of 4,000 records donated to the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center by local disc jockey Eric Rollins, who until his recent death was a leading member of the music scene in South Florida.
Mr. Rollin's records will join more than 75,000 other recordings, books, manuscripts, documents and works of art housed in the library, part of one of only three collections in the United States that offers the public easy access to an eclectic collection of African-American history and cultures. More...
Online Exhibit Features African-American Migration Experience
VOA News February 13, 2005
The first of these migrations, starting more than five centuries ago, was the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of course, the slave trade was a forced movement. In most cases, the black migrations were voluntary, as African Americans took to the road [or the rails or the seas] to seek a better life.
"For far too long, the history of the African American experience has been written as a history of our victimization, what others have done to us. With the migration you begin to see what people of African descent have done for themselves," says Howard Dodson, who heads the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library unit behind this new online exhibit. "We've been able, over the course of the three years of the project, to put together some 25,000 pages of material - 16,000 of them text [and] 8,000 of them images - to tell this really remarkable story in a very in-depth way."
The 13 migrations highlighted in this online exhibit include journeys by runaway slaves, emigration to Africa and elsewhere, and the so-called Great Migration from southern U.S. farms to northern factories. More...
New York Celebrates African-American Artist Romare Bearden
VOA News December 1, 2004
New York City is celebrating one of the 20th century's most illustrious artists, African-American painter Romare Bearden. The seven-month long tribute is a salute to Bearden's vast legacy in the worlds of art, music and academia.
The citywide festival coincides with the arrival at the Whitney Museum of Art of a traveling show of the most comprehensive exhibition of Bearden's work ever assembled. Whitney director Adam Weinberg calls the retrospective a homecoming.
"It was here in New York that Bearden found his voice. It is clearly one of the most eloquent and profound voices in post-war American art," he said.
Bearden was already a successful cartoonist when his paintings
© Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. began to attract critical attention in the 1940s. Using the lives of his grandparents in rural North Carolina and the sophisticated life of his parents during the so-called Harlem Renaissance, when the New York City neighborhood was at its peak as a center of African-American culture, he documented the joys and struggles of the African-American experience in bold colors and semi-abstract dreamscapes. More...
