The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services recently uncovered a burial site within a mile of the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Prince George’s County, according to the governor’s office. It is believed to be the final resting place for more than 230 children who died in state custody.
Robin Walker, aka the “Black History Man” wrote the amazing book "When We Ruled, first published in 2006. When We Ruled by is a great addition to proving that African Our story (not his-story) starts thousands of years before our enslavement. Although many have shown and proved to us that ourstory started long before enslavement.
Interestingly enough the author like many people of African descent heard about our enslavement so much and so often that he (along with many of us) came to believe that that’s all there is to us.
The book is one volume covering about 700 to 834 pages of ancient and not-so-ancient African civilizations going up to about the 1800s CE. It has 22 chapters, heavily illustrated photos, some full-colored, watercolors, chronologies, and bibliographies. It has a reference and a teaching text. The first edition came out in 2006, and the second edition in 2011. And our brother Runoko Rashidi does the introduction to the book.
The author makes five claims about the book which reframes everything. Walker makes the point that Black history is not slavery. He rejects the equation of "Black history" starts with the transatlantic slave trade. He uses Maulana Karenga's definition — "history is the record and process of a people engaged in struggle to shape the world in their interests and images" — to argue that the 500 years of slavery are a "minuscule part" of a far longer story of African world-shaping. Professor Anthony Browder states it this way: “if a book of African history was a thousand pages, our enslavement would be just two pages and start on page 996.”
Walker states that evidence of African ourstory is all over the continent. It’s not just in Kemet (which the Greeks call Egypt). You'll find evidence in Nubia, Aksum, the Swahili coast, Great Zimbabwe, Mali, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Ghana Empire, the Moors, and many others. He also demonstrates that the proof exists since many palaces, temples, mosques, churches still stands and that manuscripts and art have survived and can be verified, photographed, even Googled.
He has put it all in one place. Although he studied the works of Drs: Cheik Anta Diop, Ivan Van Sertima, Chancellor Williams, John G. Jackson, Yousef ben-Jochannan, John Hendrik Clarke and others. - "...but no one has put all the stuff in one place before." When We Ruled is the attempt to gather the archaeology, documents, and historical linguistics into one accessible, illustrated volume.
Finally, he argues that we could win the argument on any terms. African achievement holds up even judged by Eurocentric standards — e.g., the octagonal swimming pool at the Husuni Kubwa palace at Kilwa (Tanzania, c. 1300); glass windows and internal plumbing in African kingdoms; Mansa Musa of Mali as, by common estimate, among the richest individuals in human history. However, my understanding is that the African rulers (kings, queens, councils, etc.) don't personally own these resources. The resources belong to the people. The leaders(s) is the custodian of the resources on behalf of the society. Thus, Mansa Musa didn’t own the gold. He managed it and the Mali Empire's wealth for the people of the Mali Empire.
Examples of our great civilizations are located in the Nile Valley, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, and Southern and Central Africa. He also discuses The Moors in Spain, the slave trade, Black women's history, and the Pan-African movement round to it out.
The book has a number of strengths and only a couple of limits (certainly not weaknesses).
It is very broad and has full-color illustrations. It can be used as a reference and teaching tool. It even has a companion study guide. It has something in it for everyone. Last but not least, it's Black/independently published—the second edition being by Black Classic Press.
Its limitations are that it is dense. At 834 pages long it will take some time to read through it. Additionally, the reading can be rough. It was written for students, parents, homeschoolers, the general reader, anyone who wants the evidence in one place, and especially those who want to move beyond "Black history = slavery."
When We Ruled is a great book. There's something in there for all of us, and it can be read by anyone at any level. The title of the book is more about when Black people ruled the planet, as opposed to when Black people were being ruled or were ruled. And to a large extent, the book exists because this one man refused to accept the education handed to him. All of us can do that. He has a standard of proof: know the truth and know the lies better than the liars. Read it, verify it, and reclaim us. This book helps with all of the above.
View the book at Progressive Emporium & Education Center
Last week, advocacy groups, Fix Our House and New America released a poll showing that Americans have grown increasingly frustrated with the current two party electoral system. Decades of gerrymandering, corporate funding of elections, and persistent party antagonism have largely fueled their anger. This disdain has shined a bright light on the growing inadequacies of American democracy, which does not always equate to justice.
These sentiments are definitely felt by African Americans who have historically pointed out the contradictions of American democracy.
One glaring example occurred in St. Louis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although St. Louis has been called a “northern city with southern exposure,” it was one of the major destinations of the Great Migration where millions of Blacks relocated to the North and West to escape the racial exploitation of the American South. In 1900, there were roughly 35,000 Blacks in St. Louis. By 1920, that number nearly doubled to just under 70,000.
Despite St. Louis’s “gateway” reputation, it functioned in many respects like an impenetrable wall to the new migrants. The most spectacular form of white resistance occurred in East St. Louis in 1917, where an attempted massacre by white residents resulted, according to some estimates, in nearly 200 Black deaths.
Though uniquely spectacular in its violence, the fury of the East St. Louis Race War was not an isolated event. According to historian Carol Anderson, “White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly.”
Such was the case in St. Louis two years earlier. In 1915, the United Welfare Association, an ad hoc committee of St. Louis realtors hellbent on stemming the residential spread of African-Americans, set out to create a referendum that would make housing segregation enforceable by law.
According to the ordinance, Blacks would not be able to move into neighborhoods that were 75% white. In like manner, Whites would not be able to move into Black neighborhoods with a similar racial composition.
The Universal Welfare Association attempted to sell the proposal as mutually beneficial: “Our ordinance protects both the Negro and white man where he lives now.”
However, the proposed law appealed to the baser elements of St. Louis’s white population. Its boosters extolled its ability to counter the impending “Negro invasion” and a means to protect white “widows and dependents.”
With this framing, the ordinance easily passed in 1916. Despite the recent surge in population due to the Great Migration, Blacks were still grossly outnumbered by white St. Louisans.
Though similar laws were passed across the country, this was the first time that a housing segregation law was passed by direct voter referendum.
Missouri passed its first referendum in 1908 as part of a larger national movement to strengthen the country’s democratic institutions. Referendums were viewed as a purer form of democracy as it gave voters direct input on legislation. Yet the 1916 segregation ordinance shows how democracy has always been an elusive, wanting, and many times inadequate concept and practice for African-Americans.
Fortunately, the law was overturned the same year. In the Louisville, Kentucky based Buchanan v. Warley case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional.
Still, other means were employed to achieve the same end. The violence of East St. Louis is just one example. Other means such as housing covenants, urban removal, and the destruction of Black neighborhoods not only segregated, but displaced African American residents in St. Louis. Unfortunately, this is a trend that still persists to this day.
The geopolitical landscape has clearly changed in the past several years. An Eastern block has expanded and now includes alliances from Russia to Iran to the Alliance of Sahel States, which is comprised of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in West Africa.
The mother of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman whose body was found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3 in Jackson, Mississippi, told ABC News on Sunday afternoon that her daughter’s death has “just devastated" her family.
About 10,000 people were in the arena watching. One of them was Tupac Shakur, the number one-selling rapper who had already become a hip-hop icon at the age of 25.
Away from the ring on September 7, 1996, a bicoastal beef that had been brewing for years in the music industry was about to reach its tragic apogee. Hours after Tyson’s left hook sent Seldon face-first to the mat, Shakur was hit by four bullets in his vehicle – a drive-by shooting just off the Vegas Strip. Tupac’s right lung was destroyed. After six days on life support, he was pronounced dead.
It took 109 seconds to settle the boxing match. It has taken 30 years for anyone to face trial over Shakur’s murder.
Jury selection starts today for Duane Keith Davis – known as Keffe D – who was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon in Tupac Shakur’s death. Davis, 63, has entered a not guilty plea. Prosecutors do not claim he fired the fatal shots. They say Davis orchestrated the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew shortly after the Tyson fight.
Shakur’s death – and the similar drive-by murder of his rival Christopher Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., less than a year later – put an uncomfortable light on the increasingly angry rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap and whether artistic disputes were turning into violent real-world battles. Now, the Keffe D case is exposing just how deeply gang culture had become embedded in the industry’s embrace of the gangsta lifestyle, embodied in an artist whose work both lamented the violence that cut many young Black lives short while also glorifying it.
“He was working through his trauma with his art, his music, his poetry,” said former MTV journalist Abbie Kearse, who interviewed Shakur in 1994, “and yes, the anger comes out in real life, too, through violence.”
Tupac Shakur wasn’t just about beats and rhymes. Coming up from a rough childhood with an absent father and addicted mother, Vanity Fair reported, Shakur combined a love of hip-hop and other performing arts with classical poetry and Shakespeare.
“Look at Romeo and Juliet,” he told the Los Angeles Times a year before his death. “That’s some serious ghetto sh*t.”
After moving from the East Coast to Northern California, he joined the largely apolitical, party-focused group Digital Underground, where he first adopted the name 2Pac and served primarily as a dancer. But he had much bigger plans ahead.
Recording tracks in his spare time, Shakur secured a solo record deal. The hype man for the group best known for “Humpty Dance” released 2Pacalypse Now, a politically conscious album touching on urban violence and police brutality. After a slow start, it was eventually certified gold.
Over the course of his next studio albums, Shakur’s work ran the gamut from a sensitive ode to his mother (“Dear Mama”) to “So Many Tears,” a sad reflection on “so many homies in the cemetery.”
The former student of the Baltimore School of the Arts also became a critically praised actor in films alongside Janet Jackson and Omar Epps, earning his first role in “Juice” on the strength of his own magnetism after crashing a friend’s audition. Three films starring Shakur were released after his death.
But outside the studio and off-camera, his rising success was accompanied by repeated legal battles and violent encounters.
Tupac was charged with shooting two off-duty police officers during a scuffle in Atlanta in 1993. Those charges were eventually dropped.
The following year, Shakur faced his most serious allegations, convicted of sexually abusing a fan during a hotel encounter he said was consensual, The New York Times reported.
During jury deliberations, Tupac dropped by a New York recording studio at the invitation of a producer to contribute to a track. He was held up in the lobby and shot five times while trying to get away.
After undergoing surgery, he left the hospital against doctors’ advice, the Los Angeles Times reported, to appear at his sexual abuse sentencing in a wheelchair, his left hand bandaged and the left side of his face swollen.
Sentenced to a minimum of 18 months in prison, Shakur appealed and reached a deal with Marion “Suge” Knight – cofounder and head of Death Row Records, the top hip-hop distributor on the West Coast – getting the label to front his bail money while the appeal was pending in exchange for a three-album deal, record executive Leslie Gerard told New Yorker journalist Sheldon Pearce.
Still stinging emotionally from the recording studio shooting and assault case that both happened in New York and Shakur feared were setups, Knight told Kearse a week after Shakur’s death that Tupac had more than a financial connection to Death Row.
“Tupac loved Death Row,” he said. “Tupac loved me. I loved him.”
That connection is ultimately what put Tupac’s life in jeopardy, Davis argued in the book Compton Street Legend, which has become a key piece of evidence in the case against him. Davis, a member of the Crips, says Shakur’s relationship with Knight caught him up in the Los Angeles gang turf battles that had become woven into the rap game. The Crips were tight with Bad Boy Records on the East Coast, while the Bloods, he said, supported and protected the Death Row music organization.
“At Death Row especially, there was no question about the gang affiliations,” said Kearse.
“Tupac mistakenly thought Suge and the Death Row crew they were rolling with were untouchable and would protect him,” Davis wrote. “He seemed to have lost touch with the reality of the streets that everyone can be touched.”
His fresh association with Death Row also brought a new sound to Tupac’s repertoire reminiscent of the label’s breakout stars, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Shakur quickly took to the intensity of the coastal rivalry, blasting his former friend Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G., and Bad Boy’s top producer Sean “Puffy” Combs in “Hit ‘Em Up,” one of rap’s most unambiguously brutal diss tracks that took on almost all of East Coast rap royalty by name.
With a “THUG LIFE” tattoo emblazoned in an arc above his navel – the letter “i” replaced by a bullet casing – the Tupac of “Dear Mama” seemed to be in the rear view, at least publicly.
“It was very problematic to try to decipher which is his real life and which is fictionalized, you know,” Kearse told CNN. “I don’t know.”
Davis and his crew of Southside Compton Crips went to Las Vegas on the night of the boxing match strictly for recreation, not for trouble, he wrote. But the group was set off when Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, was attacked at the MGM shortly after the fight.
Word got to Davis that Anderson had been beaten by Tupac and his entourage in retaliation for an incident at a shopping mall where a group of Bloods were beaten by Crips in what Davis described as “another day” of back-and-forth violence between the gangs.
“We kept it moving, but there’s one thing that’s for sure when living that gangster lifestyle, you already know that the stuff you put out is going to come back to you,” Davis wrote of the mall incident. “You never know how or when, but there’s never a doubt that it’s coming.”
For Shakur, Davis said it came after the Tyson fight, when the white Cadillac Davis said he was riding in sidled up to the black BMW driven by Suge Knight on East Flamingo Road.
For such a complicated case, Keffe D’s defense is remarkably simple: You can’t trust what he says.
“I would definitely say he’s a liar,” Davis’ then-defense attorney, Carl Arnold, said to Las Vegas television station KLAS in 2024. Arnold left the defense team a year later, CNN affiliate KSNV reported.
Davis now says the book was a work of fiction, one he attached his name to strictly for the money.
“That was the ghostwriters (who) did it. I didn’t write that book,” Davis told KLAS in a jailhouse interview last month, noting its incongruous mention of a quote from Winston Churchill alongside its frequently profane descriptions of street-level gang life. “Just read the book. You know I didn’t write that book.”
But Davis’s book is part of a flurry of statements and interviews that, investigators say, taken together amount to an admission he was involved in the murder.
Davis said in the 2018 documentary “Death Row Chronicles” on BET the shots came from the back of his vehicle. In a later interview with YouTube content creator DJ Vlad, Davis said he had a “sense of remorse” for what happened.
Prosecutors say Davis gave information to investigators in a pair of recorded interviews lawyers call a “proffer.” Suspects share what they know privately, usually to see whether a deal can be worked out for a lesser charge or lighter sentence. If there’s no deal, prosecutors usually can’t use the information against them.
But after Davis’ arrest, Clark County Judge Carli Kierny ruled the proffer interviews are admissible in Keffe D’s trial because Davis made many of the same statements in his book and media blitz that he had previously told police.
“Ultimately, he just talked himself right into jail,” retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police investigator Greg Kading told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2023.
In his book, Keffe D acknowledged speaking to police and breaking the gangsta’s code in the process.
“The Feds had followed me around for fifteen years it was finally time to get the sh*t off my chest and over with,” the book said. “Everybody else from my neighborhood was getting off on the sh*t; why not get off on my sh*t? I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted.”
Davis’s book is vague on who made the call to gun down Tupac, saying it was only coincidental his crew caught up to his vehicle on the street that night, but he is clear the shooting was about revenge for the assault on his nephew.
“I stand firm on the point that Tupac, Suge Knight and the rest of those n***as didn’t have any business putting their hands on my beloved nephew, Baby Lane, period,” he wrote. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their asses.”
Suge Knight, who was behind the wheel, was grazed in the head by a bullet and bleeding profusely as he continued driving, police said.
Although gang ties to Tupac’s killing had been suspected from the beginning, the search for the killer was long hampered by the refusal of potential eyewitnesses to testify.
“All of the people seem to be looking somewhere else,” Las Vegas police spokesman Phil Roland said shortly after Shakur’s death.
With no gun or other physical evidence tying Davis to the crime, prosecutors are relying on his own words, even though they acknowledge they don’t believe everything he has said.
In particular, Keffe D claims shots came from his vehicle after Knight or Shakur raised their own weapon. Investigators don’t believe it.
“At no point during the investigation of the vehicle were any cartridge cases found inside (Knight’s) car or any weapons,” retired Las Vegas officer Clifford Mogg told the grand jury in Davis’ case.
Davis’ decision to tell all was dramatically different from Shakur’s legendary final words as he was bleeding out near Las Vegas Boulevard.
Asked by Las Vegas police officer Chris Carroll if he could name who shot him, Shakur responded, “F*ck you,” Carroll said years later.
Investigators say they are not certain who shot Tupac – Anderson or DeAndre “Big Dre” Smith, who was sitting next to him in the back seat of the Cadillac. Keffe D, who was in the front passenger seat, willingly put out his own theory.
“Orlando shot Tupac and Suge?” Davis was asked in a 2021 interview.
“He did his thing, yeah,” Davis responded. The indictment against Davis alleges he provided the gun used in the shooting.
Anderson denied any involvement in the shooting, and Keffe D said Tupac was actually his nephew’s favorite rapper.
“He had some good-ass songs, I’m not going to lie,” Davis agreed.
Anderson was killed in a gang shootout in 1998, The Los Angeles Times reported. Keffe D, now a grandfather, is the only occupant of the Cadillac still alive.
Despite the death of his biggest star and his own close call, Knight appeared to believe nothing would change in the business after Tupac’s murder.
“Not at all,” Knight told Kearse in 1996. “We’re going to do the same thing we’ve been doing and sell records.”
But any sense of returning to normal was threatened less than a year later when The Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down – like Tupac, hit by four bullets – while leaving a party in LA’s Miracle Mile. Rumors flew that it was another act of vengeance in response to Tupac’s death, but an 18-month FBI investigation didn’t turn up proof, and no one has ever been charged.
“It was a very sad time and a time where you weren’t sure if it would continue, certainly not on the level that it was,” Kearse said.
When Kearse asked Shakur in 1994 what he thought he was best known for, he laughed.
“My big mouth!” he said, drawing out the word “big” into multiple syllables. “I got a big mouth. I can’t help it.”
The next year, a more contemplative Shakur told MTV he recognized most people knew him by then as “a survivor” of a shooting and prison time. The murder case now coming to court after so many years is a reminder of what he had hoped to become, his chance cut short.
“I want people to be talking about me like, you know, ‘Remember when he was real bad?’” said Tupac. “Everybody changes. Everybody becomes better people, you know? We all should get that chance.”
