Let's make everything about RACE (Unapologetically Black Thread)

Frank "Black Caesar" Matthews (born February 13, 1944) is a major heroin and cocaine trafficker who operated throughout the eastern seaboard during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the peak of his career he operated in 21 states and supplied major dealers throughout every region of the country.
Although there is more attention paid to other drug kingpins of the era, Frank Matthews is said by the DEA to be one of the most significant traffickers of the time. He led a flamboyant lifestyle, with large sable mink coats, prime seats at major sporting events, luxury vehicles, and regular trips to Las Vegas where he was treated like a king. Matthews would also become known for hosting a major African-American drug dealers "summit" in Atlanta in 1971. The attendee list, gathered by DEA surveillance, was a who's who of most major African-American and Hispanic dealers throughout the country; they were all there to discuss how to break the Italian Mafia's control of heroin importation so that black drug dealers would not have to rely on them in the future.
Matthews was born towards the end of World War II in Durham, NC. His mother died when he was 4 years old and he was raised by his aunt, Marzella Steele, the wife of a Durham police lieutenant. Nicknamed "Pee Wee", Matthews was described as bright and curious; nevertheless, he dropped out of school in the 7th grade. He served a year for assault in the juvenile reformatory at Raleigh. On his release, he moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as a numbers writer. He was arrested in 1963 and avoided conviction by agreeing to leave Philadelphia. He moved to the Bedford Stuyvesant area of New York City and became a barber, collecting numbers as he had in Philadelphia. Matthews was now large and muscular; he became both a collector and an enforcer. This gained him the experience and cash he needed to enter illegal drug dealing.
Matthews quickly grew tired of the numbers game after realizing that what he made in a year could be made in weeks in the drug business. He began making plans to transition into the heroin business. In the early 1960s, the main supply of wholesale heroin was the Italian Mafia; Matthews knew he would have to gain favor with someone connected to get a steady, reliable connection from which to base his drug empire. Matthews was able to not only approach but gain an audience before the Gambino family and Bonanno family, both part of the "Five Families" that have controlled organized crime in New York City since the 1930s. However, both turned the young Matthews down. From his days in the numbers game he knew of "Spanish Raymond" Márquez, a prolific Harlem numbers operator. Márquez put him in contact with "El Padrino", the New York Cuban Mafia godfather Rolando Gonzalez Nuñez, a major Cuban cocaine supplier, shortly before Gonzalez fled to Venezuela because of an upcoming indictment in the United States. Before fleeing, Gonzalez sold Matthews his first kilo of cocaine for $20,000, with a promise to supply more in the future.
This relationship would expand into a very lucrative and expansive drug trafficking network. Gonzalez began sending the young drug dealer large loads of cocaine and heroin from South America at fair prices. Matthews expanded on this and, within a year, was one of the major players in the New York drug business. Realizing the need for diversification, Matthews would continually seek out new sources of supply for narcotics, willing to do business with anyone as long as the product was sufficiently pure.
By the early 1970s, the Matthews organization was handling multi-million-dollar loads of heroin. According to the DEA, "Matthews controlled the cutting, packaging, and sale of heroin in every major East Coast city." For example, in New York he operated two massive drug mills in Brooklyn: one located at 925 Prospect Place, nicknamed the "Ponderosa", and the other at 106 East 56th Street. Both locations were heavily fortified and secured, with walls reinforced with steel and concrete and protected by guards with machine guns. Besides controlling the retail sale of heroin, the organization supplied other major dealers throughout the East Coast with multi-kilogram shipments for up to $26,000 per kilogram.
In 1971, Matthews invited major African-American and Hispanic drug traffickers throughout the country to attend a meeting in Atlanta. The DEA got wind of this and monitored who attended. It was a "Who's Who" of major drug traffickers, a testament to the respect Matthews commanded because of his vast drug empire. The topic of the meeting was how to import heroin without the Mafia. Those present decided to build stronger independent relationships with the Corsican's and possibly Cubans. In addition, they agreed to diversify their product to include cocaine, which was becoming available in massive quantities.
This gathering of major drug traffickers throughout the United States is significant because it represented the changing nature of the drug business. Whereas, previously, the Italians controlled the importing and wholesaling of narcotics, therefore controlling who could and could not advance past them, now others were establishing their own pipelines. Before, the Mafia asserted behind-the-scenes control of the business while African-Americans sold and used the drugs in their cities; now the black dealers established connections and took control of their neighborhoods. This later evolved to include not just black people controlling the business, but also local gangs of black people eliminating out-of-town black suppliers trying to control their neighborhoods from a distance.
Matthews learned this lesson the hard way in Philadelphia. In Atlantic City, the Philadelphia Black Mafia killed Tyrone "Mr. Millionaire" Palmer, Matthews' main dealer in Philadelphia, at a "Club Harlem" packed with 800 people. No one was prosecuted for the crime and none of the 799 potential witnesses came forward. Three of his top lieutenants in the city were murdered by the Black Mafia.
In 1973, the DEA was set to arrest Matthews. He was arrested in Las Vegas, NV, but paid bail then disappeared. Others say he fled the scene before the arrest. Matthews allegedly took 15–20 million dollars with him and fled the country, and was never seen again.
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Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Partners With LIU to Open Music, Sports and Entertainment School

Much like his wife, Jay-Z is always working to provide more opportunities in our community.

According to HipHop-N-More, the business magnate’s Roc Nation has partnered with Long Island University (LIU) to establish the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at LIU Brooklyn. The institution will serve as “a globally renowned destination for world-class education, exceptional career development, cultural initiatives and philanthropic endeavors,” the site says.

Also, the newly-founded school will offer the Roc Nation Hope Scholarship to 25 percent of enrolled students for a debt-free education.

afrotech.com

Jay-Z's Roc Nation Partners With LIU to Open Music, Sports and Entertainment School - AfroTech

Much like his wife, Jay-Z is always working to provide more opportunities in our community. According to HipHop-N-More , the business magnate’s Roc Nation has partnered with Long Island University (LIU) to establish the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at LIU Brooklyn. The...
afrotech.com afrotech.com
 
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On this date in 1820 the Mayflower of Liberia set sail. This was the first organized Black emigration back to Africa.
It began when 86 free Blacks left New York Harbor aboard the ship the Elizabeth, which was called the Mayflower of Liberia. They were bound for the British colony of Sierra Leone, a country that welcomed free Blacks from America as well as fugitive slaves. It arrived on March 9th of that year.
On Feb. 6, 1820, a ship of freed black slaves set sail from New York for the coast of West Africa, where they would found the nation of Liberia.
Liberia’s founding can be traced to an unlikely alliance between Quakers and slaveholders, who believed that American blacks should migrate to Africa. Quakers saw more hope for blacks and former slaves in Africa than in America, while certain slaveholders thought the formation of an African colony could prevent slave revolts.
In 1815, Paul Cuffee, an African-American Quaker, led a small group of freed slaves to Sierra Leone, where they were able to establish a colony. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by a group of Quakers and slaveholders, including Justice Bushrod Washington, Speaker of the House Henry Clay and Francis Scott Key, was encouraged by Cuffee’s voyage and began working on a voyage of its own.
Many Abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, opposed the idea, believing it an attempt to rid the country of free blacks while fortifying the slaveholding community. But influential advocates such as Clay and Key “thought slavery was unsustainable and should eventually end but did not consider integrating slaves into society a viable option,” according to Slate.
The ACS, with $100,000 from Congress, arranged for 88 free blacks and three ACS agents to sail to West Africa aboard the Elizabeth, nicknamed the “Mayflower of Liberia,” on Feb. 6, 1820. The group started a colony on a small island, where it was ravaged by malaria over the course of a year. One of the ACS agents purchased a piece of land in present-day Liberia, which became the colony’s home the following year.
In 1824, the colony was named Liberia and its capital was named Monrovia in honor of President James Monroe. Over the next four decades, between 15,000 and 20,000 freed slaves and Africans rescued from illegal slave ships would join the colony, which suffered great hardships through disease and conflict with local tribes.
In the 1840s, the practically bankrupt American Colonization Society requested that the settlers declare independence. The settlers did this in 1847, founding the Republic of Liberia, the first independent democratic republic in Africa, and just the second republic—after Haiti—to be founded by blacks. Joseph J. Roberts, a free black born in Virginia, became the country’s first president.
LIBERIA TODAY:
The nation has faced economic hardship throughout its history, and tensions persisted between the politically dominant descendants of the settlers and the indigenous populations.
The descendents of American slaves, who make up roughly 5 percent of Liberia’s population, controlled the country for much of its history. This changed in 1980 when William Tolbert was ousted by Sergeant Samuel Doe, drastically changing the social, political and economic situation in the nation.
Civil war broke out in 1989, precipitated by a rebellion led by Charles Taylor. The war resulted in the deaths of 250,000 people. Taylor became president in 1997, but was pressured to step down in 2003. Taylor is now being tried at The Hague for war crimes.
In 2006, U.S. educated economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was elected president, the first female president in African history.
 
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Bob Marley was born Robert Nesta Marley in rural Rhoden Hall in the Parish of St. Ann, Jamaica. His mother was a Jamaican teenager and his father a middle-aged captain in the West Indian regiment of the British Army. Marley's parents separated when he was six and soon thereafter Robert moved with his mother to Kingston, joining the wave of rural immigrants that flooded the capital during the 1950s and 1960s. They settled in Trench Town, a west Kingston slum named for the sewer that ran through it. There, Marley shared quarters with a boy his age named "Bunny" Neville O'Riley Livingston. The two made music together, making a guitar from bamboo, sardine cans, and electrical wire and learning harmonies from local singer Joe Higgs.
Like a number of their generation, Marley and Bunny listened to radio from New Orleans; and they embraced the sounds of rhythm and blues, combining them with pieces of their musical style, producing a new music called ska. Although encouraged by his mother to learn a craft, Marley soon abandoned an apprenticeship as a welder to devote himself to music. In the 1960s, Peter McIntosh (later Peter Tosh) joined Bunny and Marley's musical sessions, bringing a real guitar and the three formed the Wailing Wailers. During this time, Marley recorded a few songs with producer Leslie Kong, introduced to him through local ska celebrity Jimmy Cliff.
Marley's earliest recordings received little radio play but strengthened his desire to sing. Joined by Junior Braithwaite and two backup singers, the Wailing Wailers recorded on the Coxsone label, supervised by Clement Dodd. The group became Kingston celebrities in the summer of 1963 with Simmer Down, a song that both indicted and romanticized the lives of Trench Town toughs, known as "rude boys." The Wailing Wailers recorded more than 30 singles in the mid-1960s, reflecting and sometimes leading the evolution of reggae, from mento to ska to rock steady. In 1963 his mother moved to Delaware, Marley followed with a lengthy visit in 1966, working jobs for Chrysler and Dupont. Yet his heart lay back home, where his new wife, Jamaican Rita Anderson, and his old passion the music of the island remained.
When he returned to home in 1967 he converted from Christianity to Rastafarianism and began the mature stage of his musical career. Marley reunited with Bunny and Peter Tosh, and together they called themselves The Wailers and began their own record label, Wail 'N' Soul. They abandoned the rude-boy philosophy for the spirituality of Rastafarian beliefs slowing their music under the new “rock steady” influence. Although the Wailers began to fit together as a group, they did not find success beyond Jamaica. In 1970 bassist Aston "Family Man" Barnett and his drummer joined the Wailers. With this addition the group attracted the attention of Island Records, a company that had started in Jamaica but moved to London.
In 1971 they recorded Catch a Fire, the first Jamaican reggae album to enjoy the benefits of a large budget and widespread commercial promotion. Catch a Fire sold modestly, better in Europe than America, but well enough to sustain the company's interest in the group. During the early 1970s the band recorded an album each year and toured extensively, slowly breaking into the European and American markets. They played shows with Americans Bruce Springsteen and Sly & the Family Stone, and in 1974 Briton’s Eric Clapton scored a hit with I Shot the Sheriff, a Marley composition.
The next year, The Wailers made their first major splash in the United States with No Woman No Cry and an album of live material. At this point, however, Peter Tosh and Bunny left the band, they then took the name Bob Marley & the Wailers. Although Marley had blended politics and music since the early days of "Simmer Down," as his success grew he became more political. His 1976 song War transcribed a speech of Haile Selassie I, the Ethiopian king upon whom the Rastafarian sect was based. Along with Rastafarian spirituality and mysticism, his lyrics probed the turmoil in Jamaica. Prior to the 1976 elections, partisanship inspired gang war in Trench Town and divided the people against themselves.
By siding with Prime Minister Michael Manley and by singing songs of a political tone Marley angered some Jamaicans. After surviving an assassination attempt in December he fled to London until the following year. When Marley returned to Jamaica in 1978, he performed in the One Love Peace Concert, seeking to improve existing political conflicts. During this show Marley orchestrated a handshake between political opponents Manley and Edward Seaga, a highly symbolic moment. Marley's activism extended beyond Jamaica, and people from developing nations around the world found hope in his music.
The group's concerts in the late 1970s attracted enormous crowds in West Africa, Latin America, in Europe and the United States. In 1980 Bob Marley & the Wailers had the honor of performing at the independence ceremony when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. His music became closely associated with the movement toward Black political independence that was then prominent in several African and South American countries. The first global pop star to emerge from a developing nation.
Bob Marley died May 11th 1981 in Miami, Fl. at the age of 36 from cancer that began in his toe and spread throughout his body. The Jamaican government held a national funeral honoring his memory. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
 
KHUFU said:
I did not know that the Winans were still around. This is where a butt whuppin’ would be the best educational tool.
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And a left hook to put him down. Once he comes to he will be humming CeCe's new album and won't be racist anymore
 
computersputin said:
The term model minority is used by lazy minded people to write off accomplishments and success of a whole other race , just so they don't feel so bad about their own race's failure.
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Hmmm. Just came across this.
Interesting.

Is this what you honestly feel? From what I gather, you seem to think Black Folks are the ones that dominate the usage of that phrase.

I am wondering who you think even created the term Model Minority in the first place. I seriously doubt it is Black folks if we are being honest.
 
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DCAllAfrican said:
Hmmm. Just came across this.
Interesting.

Is this what you honestly feel? From what I gather, you seem to think Black Folks are the ones that dominate the usage of that phrase.

I am wondering who you think even created the term Model Minority in the first place. I seriously doubt it is Black folks if we are being honest.
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How could one begin to type something like that, if the individual were not a wannabe David Duke?
 
On this date in 1898, the “Grandfather Clause” was enacted for voting purposes.
The Grandfather Clause was a legal or constitutional mechanism passed by seven Southern states during reconstruction to deny suffrage to black Americans. It meant that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1867, or their lineal descendants, would be exempt from educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. As a result, even if they met all the requirements, they were not allowed to vote.
Because the former slaves were not granted that right until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, these clauses worked effectively to exclude Blacks from voting and assured the vote of many impoverished and illiterate whites. In 1915 the Supreme Court declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional because it violated equal voting rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.
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