Southern Oregon Black Leaders, Activists, and Community Coalition

10/28/2022

Check out Imagine Blacks VOTER GUIDE it’s live on our Socials, Website, and Mighty Networks.

Text VOTE to 1(833)391-1294 or visit www.imagineblack.org/vote to learn more!!

06/08/2022

04/26/2022

TODAY is your LAST DAY to register to vote! It takes less than 3 minutes at: https://oregonvotes.gov/register

To register to vote in Oregon, you must be:

✅ A U.S. citizen
✅ A resident of Oregon
✅ At least 16* years old

*You will not receive a ballot until an election occurs on or after your 18th birthday.

02/15/2022

Full article by Nataki Garrett

Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director offers a timely list of colleagues to keep an eye on.

02/15/2022

✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽

02/14/2022

This month SOBLACC wants you to know:

Black History is American history.

There is not a single sector that has gone untouched by Black ingenuity.

History is being forged everyday.

This Black History Month, we are celebrating Black leaders who dared to imagine brighter futures for us all.

Today we are giving flowers to Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey Jr. (January 5, 1931 – December 1, 1989) was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). He created AAADT and its affiliated Ailey School as havens for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance

Although Ailey died nearly 30 years ago, many of his best-known pieces have become as emblematic of vibrant, relevant American art as tap dance, jazz, the literature of Toni Morrison and hip-hop. Ailey explored issues of social justice, racism and spirituality in the African-American experience. This was during the height of the civil rights movement, when the notion of black classically trained dancers moving to the music of Duke Ellington, gospel, blues, Latin and African pop was truly revolutionary, if not unfathomable.

02/07/2022

This month SOBLACC wants you to know:

Black History is American history.

There is not a single sector that has gone untouched by Black ingenuity.

History is being forged everyday.

This Black History Month, we are celebrating Black leaders who dared to imagine brighter futures for us all.
Today we are giving flowers to Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades.

Proof that visibility is not necessary to make an impact, Ella Baker is one of history’s lesser-known civil rights heroes, yet one of the most important. If Martin Luther King Jr. was the head of the civil rights movement, Ella Baker was its backbone.

In the 1940s, she developed a grassroots approach as an NAACP field secretary to gather and convince black people of the group’s message — a vision that holds true today — that a society of individuals can and should exist “without discrimination based on race.” In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help King form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, through which she facilitated protests, built campaigns and ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship. Baker did grow frustrated at the lack of gender equality within the group, and came close to quitting in 1960. But then, on Feb. 1, four black college students sat at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. After being denied service, they were asked to leave. Instead, they refused to leave and a movement was born.

02/01/2022

This month SOBLACC wants you to know:
1. Black History is American history.
2. There is not a single sector that has gone untouched by Black ingenuity.
3. History is being forged everyday.
This Black History Month, we are celebrating Black leaders who dared to imagine brighter futures for us all.
Today we are giving flowers to:

Robert Abbott
Founder of the Chicago Guardian
Robert Sengstacke Abbott (December 24, 1870 – February 29, 1940) was an American lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor. Abbott founded The Chicago Defender in 1905, which grew to have the highest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in the country.

Born just five years after the end of the Civil War, Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded a weekly newspaper, The Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in history, in 1905. Without Abbott, there would be no Essence, no Jet (and its Beauty of the Week), and no Black Enterprise. The success of The Chicago Defender made Abbott one of the nation's most prominent postslavery black millionaires, along with beauty product magnate Madam C.J. Walker and paved the way for prominent black publishers such as Earl G. Graves, John H. Johnson and Edward Lewis.

What started off as 25 cents in capital and a four-page pamphlet distributed strictly in black neighborhoods quickly grew into a readership that eclipsed half a million a week at its peak, numbers that mirror the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel today. The paper’s rise in stature and circulation was due in large part to Abbott being a natural hustler. The Defender was initially banned in the South due to its encouragement of African-Americans to abandon the area and head North, but the Georgia native used a network of black railroad porters (who would eventually become the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) to distribute the paper in Southern states.

After the influx of blacks in the Midwest following the Great Migration, Abbott and The Defender turned their attention to other issues afflicting blacks in the early 20th century, including Jim Crow segregation, the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and the deadly 1919 Chicago riots that mirrored recent-day demonstrations seen in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.

12/21/2021

This sad season of massive deaths is nearly killing me! From my precious Mom to five eulogies in one week, and now my very dear sister bell hooks! She was an intellectual giant, spiritual genius & freest of persons! We shall never forget her!