FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Saturday, February 19, 2011

DID THE FRAMERS OF THE CONSTITUTION DELIBERATELY PLANT THE SEEDS OF EMANCIPATION?

George Washington, John QuincyAdams and Thomas Jefferson all enlightened luminaries who's thinking saw centuries into the future, planted the seeds of emancipation cleverly into the very fabric of the American Consitution and Declaration of Independence.  I think that these men cleverly embedded language into The Constitution like a timed alarm that would chime at a later time when America would be amenalble to cultural change.  Surely the founding fathers knew slavery was far too imbedded into the fabric of Post-Colonial socioeconomics for change in their lifetime.  But they engineered the genes of freedom to manifest in a more settled and mature America.
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