Coolio best known for '90s hit 'Gangsta's Paradise,' dies at 59

Los Angeles rapper Coolio, who rose to the national spotlight in the 1990s with his Grammy-winning hit "Gangsta's Paradise," died on Wednesday, his longtime manager Jarez Posey confirmed to ABC News. He was 59.

Coolio, whose legal name is Artis Leon Ivey Jr., was found unresponsive Wednesday afternoon while visiting a friend's house, and emergency personnel were called after he didn't come out of the bathroom, according to Posey. A cause of death has not yet been determined but an investigation is ongoing.

"We are saddened by the loss of our dear friend and client, Coolio, who passed away this afternoon," Coolio's representative, Sheila Finegan​, executive partner at Trinity Artists International, told ABC News in a statement Wednesday evening. "He touched the world with the gift of his talent and will be missed profoundly. Thank you to everyone worldwide who has listened to his music and to everyone who has been reaching out regarding his passing. Please have Coolio's loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

[ABBC NEWS

NAASD HOSTS REPARATIONS SUMMIT IN ATLANTA

To commemorate the 1972 National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants (NAASD) will hold its inaugural Reparations Summit September 30-October 1, 2022 at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA. The theme of the inaugural summit will be “Where Do We Go From Here: Imagining Our Future.”

The opening address will be given by activist and author of the book “Redress: The Untold Story of Japanese Reparations” John Tateishi. During the two day summit discussions and insight into the modern day Reparations movement will take precedent. Each day will feature activities that will be focused towards:

-Leadership & Organizer Training
-Genealogy & Group Therapy
-Reparations Roundtables

Featured panelists will include:

-Kamilah Moore, Chair of the California Reparations Task Force
-Dr. William “Sandy” Darity. Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University
-Dr. Shirley Weber, California Secretary of State and author of AB 3121
*Dr. Weber will also give the summit’s Keynote Address

The National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants (NAASD) is a grassroots association of community activists from across the United States that came together around May 2019 though the pursuit of political education and a desire to understand the plight of our people. NAASD became an official 501c3 organization in March 2022.

NAASD is committed to educating and training American Freedmen, who are Black American Descendants of US Chattel Slavery, on civic engagement nationwide. Our mission serves to empower the future generations of American Freedmen to preserve our unique lineage and culture for decades to come, while advancing principles that heal America and preserve democracy for all.

Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad
National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants
+1 202-503-4729
email us here
Visit us on social media:
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Congressman Mfume and Senator Cardin Introduce Bill to Establish National Council on African American History and Culture

Congressman Kweisi Mfume (MD-07) and Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) announced the introduction of the National Council on African American History and Culture Act of 2022 in the United States House of Representatives and Senate. This legislation would create a 12-person National Council on African American History and Culture to educate, preserve and celebrate Black history and culture. In short, the Council would advise the National Endowment for the Humanities on how they can best amplify the work of Black creators, strengthen teaching and learning in schools to ensure Black history and culture is recognized, and provide critical resources dedicated to preserving Black history. 

“African Americans have played an essential role in creating our country as it exists today. Yet, our contributions are not always fully recognized, celebrated, or preserved, including in the humanities,” said Congressman Kweisi Mfume. “Establishing the National Council on African American History and Culture will ensure African American history is fully integrated into the telling of American history. By giving Black professors, artists, and storytellers a seat at the table, America advances one step closer to a nation that recognizes the tremendous value of Black history and culture.”

“The lessons our children learn in school last a lifetime, and for too long those lessons have failed to fully acknowledge the role of Black Americans. And it happens in far more places than schools – so much of what we have learned for generations about history, music, culture and more has diminished the role of African American creators, writers, musicians and beyond,” said Senator Ben Cardin. “I am proud to lead the effort in the Senate to advance the companion legislation to Congressman Mfume’s bill to create a National Council on African American History and Culture. The time has come to ensure that every future generation has a factual and complete understanding of the role that all Americans have played in advancing our society, and this legislation moves us decisively in the right direction.”

Highlights of the National Council on African American History and Culture Act of 2022

1. The Council will be composed of 12 members appointed by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate.
    
2. The Council will prepare an annual report for the Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which evaluates various programs and activities of the NEH to document the extent to which they are contributing to the preservation and celebration of Black history and culture.
    
3. The Council will also:
   1. Monitor the work of museums and organizations dedicated to the preservation of Black history and culture; 
   2. Gather information concerning historical developments and cultural trends in Black history and culture; 
   3. Propose national policy recommendations to foster and promote the understanding of African American history, the preservation of African American culture, and the celebration of African Americans as contributors to the country’s economic, cultural, and political success; and
   4. Make and furnish research and recommendations at the Chairperson of the NEH may request.

To view the full text of the National Council on African American History and Culture Act of 2022, click here.

The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Announces its Tenth Class of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, has announced the 2022-2023 class of fellows.

“We are happy to welcome our next cohort of distinguished and dynamic W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” says Gates. “We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year. A poetry collection, a musical, a transnational history of the Seminoles, belonging and justice in Caribbean visual and literary cultures, an album on Hiphop as an educational tool, a study of the slave market of colonial Guadalajara, artistic representations of Black grief, amateur ministrelsy, and the 1866 cholera epidemic and origin of public health as a field are among the innovative projects which the 2022-2023 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”

The twenty-three 2022-2023 W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:

• Aabid Allibhai is a Doctoral Candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Allibhai will be at work on the dissertation Belinda Sutton’s World: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Abolition in Revolutionary New England.

• David Augustine is a Hiphop Artist in New Orleans, Louisiana. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Augustine will be at work on the album Hip Hop Saved My Life – Examining Hip Hop as a Teaching Tool Inside the Black Community.

• Rhae Lynn Barnes is Assistant Professor of American Cultural History at Princeton University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Barnes will be at work on the book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface, about amateur blackface in the U.S., and Fugitive Sounds, a digital database of the descriptions of voices and music of enslaved and self-emancipated Americans recorded for use by blackface performers.

• Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor in American Cultural History and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Bernier will be at work on the book “Why not we endure hardship that our race may be free? The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Papers and Douglass Family Lives: The Biography.

• David Bindman is the Emeritus Durning-LawrenceProfessor of the History of Art at University College London.  In residence as the Image of the Black Archive & Library Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Bindman will be at work on the volumes The Image of the Black in Latin America and Caribbean Art and The Image of the European in African Art.

• Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. In residence as the Richard D. Cohen Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Brown will be at work on Black Elegies, a book-length study of artistic representations of Black grief within and beyond the genre of poetry.

• Panashe Chigumadzi is a Doctoral Candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University.  In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Chigumadzi will be at work on the dissertation The Israelites and the Ethiopians: Dylann Roof, the AME Church and the Transatlantic Apartheid.

• John J. Clegg is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economic History at Lund University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Clegg will be at work on the book From Plantation to Prison, co-authored with Adaner Usmani, which situates American mass incarceration in comparative and historical contexts. 

• Jorge Delgadillo Núñez is a Chancellor’s Advance Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine.  In residence as a SlaveVoyages Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Delgadillo will contribute information on the slave market of colonial Guadalajara to the Slave Voyages Database and be at work on a study of the internal slave trade in the Spanish Empire.

• Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. In residence as a Shelia Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Downs will be at work on a history of the field of public health and the 1866 cholera epidemic, Deadly Water: A New Origin of Story of Public Health.

• Reighan Gillam is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Gillam will be at work on the book Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism which examines Afro-Brazilian engagement with African American culture, performance, and community.

• Mandy Izadi is a Broadbent Junior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute & St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Izadi will be at work on the book Born of War: Seminoles and the Making of America, a transnational history of the Seminoles from the mid-18th century to the 21st century.

• Nancy Jacobs is Professor of History at Brown University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Jacobs will be at work on The Global Grey Parrot, a book-length study at the nexus of African, environmental, economic, and Animal-Human histories.  

• Rashauna R. Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Johnson will be at work on the book Strange Roots: Black Intimacies in the Global Plantation South, which weaves together family and regional stories to reveal a history of global assemblage in the rural plantation South.

• Stevie Johnson is a Hiphop artist and scholar. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Johnson will be at work on Little Africa on Fire, Still, a scholarly and personal study which situates the album Fire in Little Africa as an intervention in post-Civil Rights Black identity and discourse around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

• Tamary Kudita is a fine art photographer. In residence as a J. M. D. Manyika Fellow for Spring 2023, Kudita will be at work on the project Locating the Self Within the Black Photographic Archive Whilst Mapping the Postcolonial Terrain Across Different Geographies.

• Shirley Moody-Turner is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Moody-Turner will be at work on the book “Courageous Revolt”: Anna Julia Cooper, An Interpretive Biography.

• Jeffrey Murray is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. In residence as a Mandela Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Murray will be at work on a history of classical scholarship and education in Natal, Classics in Natal, 1843-2000.

• Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at University West London, Brentford. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Parkes will be at work on a new approach to African and Diaspora studies called The Remainder Project. His primary output will be a collection of poems entitled s(ang'st)ill.

• Antonia Gabriela Pereira is a Coordinator at "Biblioteca e Centro Cultural Preto Casa Futuro," Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Pereira will be at work on the book Being Strong in Black Diaspora: Black Women's Bodies, Racial Violence, and Community Activism of Black Fighter Boxer Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean.

• Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and English, Brandeis University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Smith will be at work on DreadKin, a book-length study of literary and visual cultures that map belonging and justice in the context of the Caribbean’s complex experiences with sovereignty in the global present.

• K’Naan Warsame is a poet, writer, and musician. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop  Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Warsame will be at work on the musical The Storyteller and the novel Frog Legs.

• Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Associate Provost and North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University. In residence as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Zeleza will be at work on the book The Long Transition to the 21st Century: A Global History of the Present and the memoir Navigating the Ivory Tower: A Transatlantic Memoir.

Senga Nengudi: First African American woman to win the Nasher Sculpture Prize

Sculptor and performance artist Senga Nengudi is the winner of the 2023 Nasher Prize.

With the international award, the 79-year-old Nengudi will receive $100,000 — along with a trophy designed by the center's architect, Renzo Piano.

The Chicago-born, California-raised Senga Nengudi is known for pushing the boundaries of sculpture into performance art, notably with "Ceremony for Freeway Frets" from 1978. Nengudi and a group of fellow artists, often donning items she designed, climbed under a Los Angeles freeway overpass. While they performed music and danced, she distributed artworks made from what has been a signature material, pantyhose.

Nengudi has often used pantyhose to evoke women, the boundaries that encase them, human flesh in general and the fragility of that flesh (the pieces can decay — and disappear.

Nengudi has knotted and stuffed pantyhose, suggesting sagging human bodies as well as discarded materials and discarded lives. The artist herself has performed with her sculptural pieces. Clearly influenced by the Civil Rights Movement as well as feminism, these works have had Nengudi tied down or restrained in webs of stretched pantyhose. Nengudi often records these ephemeral works with film, video, photography — and in her own journals.

The Nasher comes with the largest cash award of any international sculpture prize. Nengudi was chosen by an 8-member panel that included the previous winner, Nairy Baghramain, and longtime Nasher jurist, Sir Nicholas Serota, the chair of Arts Council England.

[SOURCE: KERANEWS]