HBCU football teams to make history in inaugural Celebration Bowl

Two HBCU football teams will make history in the inaugural Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl which will pit the SWAC champion, Alcorn State (9-3) against the MEAC champion, North Carolina A&T Aggies (9-2). The winner will be the ultimate HBCU champion! The game will be played at the Georgia Dome on December 19th and will air on ABC at noon Eastern Time.

December 19th marks the ultimate face-off in HBCU HISTORY! Get your tix for the Air Force Reserve #CelebrationBowl today...

Posted by Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

9 Christmas gift ideas for black children.

Here are nine gift ideas for black children. The list includes toys for both boys and children's books.

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GIRLS

BOYS

BOOKS

African American Film Critics Association: Best Film, Straight Outta Compton

The AAFCA (African American Film Critics Association) honors excellence in cinema by creating awareness for films with universal appeal to black communities, while emphasizing films about the black experience and those produced written, directed and starring performers of African descent. It will hold its awards ceremony February 10 in Hollywood.

Here’s the full list of winners:

Best Picture
Straight Outta Compton (Universal Pictures)

Best Director
Ryan Coogler,Creed (Warner Bros.)

Best Ensemble
Straight Outta Compton (Universal Pictures)

Best Actor
Will Smith, Concussion (Sony)

Best Actress
Teyonah Parris, Chi-Raq (Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios)

Best Supporting Actor
Jason Mitchell – Straight Outta Compton (Universal Pictures)

Best Supporting Actress
Tessa Thompson, Creed (Warner Bros.)

Best Independent Film
Chi-Raq (Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios)

Best Screenplay
Rick Famuyiwa – Dope (Open Road Films)

Breakout Performance
Michael B. Jordan, Creed (Warner Bros.)

Best Animation
The Peanuts Movie (20thCentury Fox)

Best Documentary
A Ballerina’s Tale (Sundance Selects)

Best Song
“See You Again”, Furious 7 (Atlantic Records)

Best TV Comedy
Black-ish (ABC)

Best TV Drama
How to Get Away with Murder (ABC)

Best Cable/New Media TV Show
Survivor’s Remorse (Starz)

AAFCA Top Ten Films of 2015 in order of distinction:

1. Straight Outta Compton (Universal Pictures)
2. Creed (Warner Bros.)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros.)
4. Beasts of No Nation (Netflix)
5. The Martian (20th Century Fox)
6. 3-1/2 Minutes/Dope (HBO/Open Road Films)
7. Chi-Raq (Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios)
8. Carol (Weinstein Co.)
9. The Big Short (Paramount Pictures)
10. The Danish Girl (Focus Features)

Ava DuVernay Barbie Doll Sells Out

The Ava DuVernay Barbie doll has sold out on Mattel's website minutes after it first went on sale.

The Selma director's doll was met with particular excitement, with her twitter followers clamoring for Mattel to make the doll — which comes with a director's chair with her name on it — available to the public.

Mattel heard them, and DuVernay announced the sale of the Ava Barbie Sunday, tweeting, "Tomorrow this Ava Barbie goes on sale for Christmas because enough folks asked Mattel to do so." She added in another Tweet that all proceeds will be donated to Witness and Color of Change charities.

Mattel confirmed in a Dec. 6 Tweet that the dolls would be available for purchase Dec. 7 and that they would be providing further information about where to purchase them. At 10 a.m. PT, Mattel announced Monday, the dolls will go on sale at TheBarbieCollection.com

But they didn't last long, with DuVernay tweeting at 10:26 a.m. PT: "Sold out on Barbie collection, I'm told. More available at Amazon. What the hell is going on? #bananas #nuts #whoa"

Ava Barbie was indeed (briefly) available at Amazon — for pre-order. Selling for $65, the online retailer announced the doll would be released Jan. 1.

But even pre-order availability was short-lived, with Amazon selling out almost as quickly as Mattel had.

[SOURCE]

University professors uncover new sci fi story by W.E.B. Du Bois

If you’re an avid reader of science fiction by big name authors like Ben Bova, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula Le Guin, you may have heard that the earliest African-American writer in the genre is Samuel Delaney. He was an early one who has definitely made a big contribution to the genre. However, there was one who predated him by several decades. Because he was more known for his non-fiction on race issues of his time, most people would not think W.E.B. Du Bois wrote science fiction among other fiction genres. Scholars have already known about W.E.B. Du Bois’ science fiction that often served as social criticism especially in light of technology. One of these stories is “The Comet”. But two university professors opened a Du Bois scholar’s version of a “Christmas gift” earlier this year but news media started reporting on it only since the beginning of the month. The “gift”: a short story by Du Bois entitled “The Princess Steel” that may be his earliest science fiction work to date.

Britt Rusert, professor of African-American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Adrienne Brown who is a University of Chicago professor discovered Du Bois’ “The Princess Steel” in an archives box packed with short fiction of various genres, including science fiction, states a Slate.com article. According to “io9”’s Charlie Jane Anders, the story was originally titled “The Megascope: A Tale of Tales”. Rusert and Brown “have dated [it] to 1908 and 1910—much earlier than any of Du Bois’ other speculative fiction,” explains Slate.com.

According to Slate, the story involves a black sociologist who looks into the past with a device called a “megascope”. Through the megascope, he sees a mythic society where an African princess, called the Princess Steel, is imprisoned by an imperial character known as “The Lord of the Golden Way”. He steals the princess’s silver hair that he discovers to be made of steel and uses it to establish a global-wide mill industry. Slate says the story is an important link in Afrofuturism, a social criticism movement against racism and poverty that often uses science fiction by black storytellers as a tool to teach about these issues.

[SOURCE]