Ebony, Jr.!  Way to get this reader nostalgic!  I started this blog as a 54-year-old woman enjoying the prose and the images—and then suddenly, I was back on Addison Street near 54^th, feeling the shiny pages, sitting on the floor of a three-room apartment and traveling into the black-and-white world of Ebony and the luxurious color of National Geographic.  Too old for Ebony, Jr. myself, but as a teenager, I thought it was adorable.

By that time, I was in the library reading Baldwin, slowly and carefully, to take in every drop of fury. I still see youngsters eating up books as I imagine Nia did.   Tree House Books on Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia comes to mind, Black Writers Museum in Germantown, and Mighty Writers in South Philly. In all of these places, as in several branches of the Free Library, I’ve felt that delighted absorption just humming: beautiful children exploring the world through words and images, sharing or reading alone, looking for help from the whole wide world on how to grow up despite everything that is thrown at them. – Lorene

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by Nia Ngina Meeks

I’m a black woman writer in search of a bookstore to love with unadulterated abandon.

It is a passion, an affair that once swelled and then slipped away. Memories of its touch, its smell, linger, and nearly haunt, casting current suitors for my book-loving heart in unrequited light.

As much as I enjoyed sipping iced coffee and free air conditioning in Borders, the demise of the chain didn’t strike me as hard as when those neighborhood Timbuktus boarded up their doors and windows.

Those were heady days of incense-and-oil scented gathering spots, where liberation and literature melded. The air was collegial and communal, free from suspicions of thievery or malice. Every adult felt like a caretaker, a distant aunt or uncle who would ask about your studies and smile their encouragement at a little browngirl in glasses reading intently.

There was warmth in the colorful posters celebrating authors and readings, faces that looked like mine.

And the rows of books! From my vantage, they appeared to touch the sky, with the width of the horizon.

Claude McKay boogied with Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka. Alex Haley arm wrestled W.E.B. DuBois and Paule Marshall for shelf space. Success beamed from the covers of Essence and Ebony – and my favorite, Ebony Jr. Genre-specific and age appropriate, always. Billy Joe Jive, Super Private Eye would never be clustered in with a Chester Himes pot-boiler, nor Alice Childress with Alain Locke.

Of course, the same can’t always be said for mainstream booksellers, even in this day and age. While you seldom find Danielle Steele crammed next to Shakespeare, it’s common to find African (if you’re lucky) and African-American literary giants banished to a set of corner shelves amid the latest “street lit” hit.

Shared skin condemns us to a shared ghetto, once again.

Clearly, there’s value in the written word at every level, but let’s not pretend that the depth of thought and grace of prose that a James Baldwin or a Toni Cade Bambara summons don’t outclass the latest hoochie-and-hustler tale that equates today’s marketed “black literature.” Because they do.

Unfortunately, many in the book selling industry live in such a la-la land. That leaves me longing for my bookstores of old, saddened that I won’t have similar places to take and nurture my little ones.

Those locations of my youth have long faded from the average consciousness, and unfortunately, hubs of black commerce. What too often passes for centers of innovation or re-invention now takes the form of nail salons, wig and weave shops, and the ubiquitous cell phone joints that infest urban communities.

Indeed, it’s a new day.

Yet, even this day offers new opportunities. I’m happy to see the resurgence of Ebony and Jet, those storied pillars of Johnson Publishing Co. I’m even excited to see Ebony Jr. resurface, packaged now for a digital age. Any effort to increase literacy and a love of reading should be applauded, and this is one that deserves a soul clap. I expect Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other devices now will document the new adventures of Sunny and Honey, along with the poetry and prose of authors known and unknown.

Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and fellow members of their pantheon will live eternally through mobiles.

While comforting, it doesn’t totally ease my nostalgia for scampering through the aisles of my beloved bookstore, beaded braids swaying, clutching my latest find, in search of a quiet corner to soak it in, along with all the conversation from the grownups floating above.

Those people spanned a swath of economic diversity. To a person, they would declare that with an education, a destiny of greatness awaited my generation.

And I believed them.

Nia Ngina Meeks is an award-winning journalist, communications consultant, political strategist, educator, occasional philosopher, and aspiring author based in Philadelphia. Like her on Facebook at “Nia Means Purpose” and follow her on Twitter @nmpurpose.

Michael A. Nutter, Mayor
Mark McDonald, Press Secretary
Office: 215-686-6210
Cell: 267-303-9248

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Philadelphia, October 10, 2011

- Mayor Michael A. Nutter has appointed Lorene Cary, a respected novelist, educator and founder of Art Sanctuary, a community arts organization that showcases African American art, to the School Reform Commission.

“Lorene Cary is a nationally recognized writer, she has a tremendous education background, but for me what is truly outstanding is that she has an incredible passion for the well-being of children; she cares very personally about parents and she’s very much focused on supporting teachers. She will be a tremendous asset to the School Reform Commission and the children of Philadelphia,” said Mayor Nutter.

Ms. Cary’s novel, “The Price of a Child,” was the inaugural One Book One Philadelphia selection in 2003. A senior lecturer in creative writing in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania, Cary founded Art Sanctuary in 1998 as a means of using African American art to enrich the city and region, to bring the arts to schools and to build and strengthen a network among artists.

Ron Tomalis, Pennsylvania Secretary of Education, said, “I am pleased to welcome Lorene to the SRC, as I believe her experience will be beneficial to the school district and the Commission. I look forward to working with her and her colleagues in the coming months as we address many of the critical issues facing the district.”

A 2002 winner of the prestigious Philadelphia Award, Cary said, “I am honored to serve Philadelphia’s students, teachers, and school leaders, and through them, our entire city.  My parents were both Philadelphia public school teachers; I attended elementary school here; our children have spent about half their school life in District schools; and as a writer and arts organization director, I’ve worked with schools and with kids, parents, and grandparents who know that a good education is their only real hope for success.  I am grateful to be called to serve them on this committed and talented team.”

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Ms. Cary has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Penn. She also won a Thouron Fellowship and earned an MA in Victorian Literature from Sussex University in the United Kingdom.

She graduated from St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H. and later taught at the school. Her first book, “Black Ice,” is a powerful coming of age memoir about her time as a student at St. Paul’s and as a teacher and trustee at the school.

For more than a decade, the Art Sanctuary has been a labor of love for Ms. Cary. Originally based in North Philadelphia at the Church of the Advocate, where Ms. Cary also taught Sunday School, Art Sanctuary has relocated its staff offices, gallery and classroom to a renovated building at 16^th and Bainbridge streets.

Ms. Cary lives in East Falls with her husband, the Rev. Robert C. Smith, rector of the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd. The couple has two daughters.

The School Reform Commission is the five-member governing body of the School District of Philadelphia.  The commission was established in 2001 when control of the district was assumed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  The Governor of Pennsylvania appoints three of the members, and the Mayor of Philadelphia appoints two members to the commission.

“Lorene brings a spirit of openness and energy to everything she does, and her skill sets and commitments will nicely complement those of the sitting members,” said Dr. Lori Shorr, Mayor Nutter’s Chief Education Officer and a newly installed Executive Advisor to the SRC and School District. “She knows first-hand how tough this work is on the ground, and it’s a testament to her passion for educational opportunity that she is willing to take on an assignment that is so central to the city’s well-being.”

Ms. Cary will join the Mayor’s other recent appointee, Dr. Wendell E. Pritchett, Chancellor of Rutgers University-Camden, on the SRC. The new members will join two current gubernatorial appointees – Denise McGregor Armbrister and Joseph A. Dworetzky.Gov. Corbett has nominated Pedro Ramos to serve on the SRC and he’s awaiting confirmation by the Pennsylvania Senate.

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Chinua Achebe was the first writer I read who articulated for me with absolute Igbo clarity that art could be created as a service to its community.  This answered for me the tension I felt as a young writer.  My African-American community preferred content that was useful, or simply put, good for the race.  My liberal, Western training, on the other hand, dismissed moral uplift as less than artful; it was propaganda’s next-of-kin.

For Tamika Guishard to go through Tisch talking about bringing back the afterschool special had to be hard, but her vision included the very African criteria of usefulness to her community.  I applaud her for understanding that she had to define her own aesthetic criteria and then defend them.

It was a pleasure to teach Tamika as an undergraduate in a writing class some years back.  It is brilliant to watch her grow into an emerging artist with the marketing chops and hustle to support her own work in a very tough industry. – Lorene

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by Tamika R. Guishard

Having recently graduated from New York University’s Graduate Film program, I am honored and humbled for this opportunity to share my journey in filmmaking, because it has just begun!   The only Black woman in my class, I have spent the past five years under Tisch’s tutelage: three years of coursework followed by two years to complete my signature work, a thesis film entitled, Jackie.

The fact that my “student work,” including a number of documentary and narrative shorts, has been nationally televised and on big screens is exciting.  However, it also thrills me to work as a storyteller in intimate settings, such as educational institutions, and actually witness film’s transformative power to engender critical thinking.  Any teacher will tell you, there’s no other feeling like this…

You see, my path as a writer/director is a bit unorthodox.   In my entrance interview for NYU, I said “I want to bring back the after school special” and update it for this generation.  I figured, if I was going to do this (wrack up this debt, fund these productions) it had to be on my terms—not necessarily those of the “industry.”  I want to tell stories I believe in.

Lo and behold, they let me in!  Balls out, no pretense.  That Fall, I said good bye to my middle school Social Studies classroom and “hello” to Tisch’s infamous tenth floor, where I was going to brand “Social Studies filmmaking” across disciplines, genres and molds.

It has not been easy.  At times I feel a little bit crazy: who am I to break ground in an industry with only a handful of women writing/directing, and on that hand, maybe two fingernails are African-American!?  Yet, at this moment in history, I would be remiss not to have jumped at the opportunity to obtain this skill-set and manifest my stories – our stories – on screen.  Sitting in the audience that first time and feeling their reactions to cinema that, only a short time ago, lived only in my head makes it all worth it.

Luckily, with a Communications degree from my alma mater, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School, I already knew the ins and outs of the business of media: the importance of public relations, marketing and branding.  In West Philadelphia I never thought that I would be using these tenets in campaigning for my own body of work.

I candidly kept folks abreast of my filmmaking process via a bi-monthly newsletter a full year before Jackie’s completion.  I was committed to shooting my thesis film on actual film; this classic medium is a bit pricey, to say the least.  Individual donors largely funded Jackie, even in this recession, because they trust me to tell this story, with all of my imperfections, in a perfect way.

At this boiling point of political and environmental change, I think that people want to leave a mark.  Having witnessed my fire, however flawed, in pushing for this film’s production, even while working at a “9 to 5”, donors were not only compelled to contribute, but also confident that they would be part of Jackie’s lasting impression.

On the first of October, Jackie is complete.  I look forward to submitting it to the (film) festival circuit and ensuring that those that need to see it—youth in foster care, diabetics, families affected by leukemia and teenage mothers—actually do.  I will admit that I have a unique passion for filmmaking that may even come off as lax, while I have devoted energy to nontraditional jobs on this journey.   Yet, I can testify that from underserved classrooms to long lost graveyards, the Brooklyn Academy of Music performance hall to Spike Lee’s lecture hall, storytelling is an unmatched art.  My uncharted work experience feeds my creative voice so that my films will resonate like none other.

I am artist, citizen, teacher, storyteller whose priority is to empower.  I thank God that I have never had to choose between my principles and a paycheck (and if that day were to come, please believe, it will get me out of debt!)  But seriously, having taught history, I foresee the textbook pages on our current, critical era and know that any movement worth encapsulating takes time.  Which is why, as a filmmaker, I’m just getting started and will stay the course in concocting cinematic folklore that lives on.

Slow and steady…means everyone wins.

A first-generation American, born of Caribbean heritage in 1980’s East New York, Brooklyn, Tamika R. Guishard’s ultimate goal as a filmmaker is to foster a re-birth of the after-school special for today’s urban youth.  Her return to her hometown of East New York as a seventh grade Social Studies teacher cemented Tamika’s desire to make realistic films that entertain, enlighten, and teach.  She founded B. Good Productions, a holistic media organization with storytelling at its foundation and education as its core, in her first year of NYU Graduate Film school.

As a federal Park Ranger at Manhattan’s African Burial Ground, she has worked with WNET/PBS and the Harlem Children’s Zone in producing webisodes for the Internet launch of Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”  Tamika’s filmmaking has screened at venues ranging from public school classrooms to the University of Chicago, the intimate Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe to the expansive 34th Street Loews Cinema, The Schomburg Research Center and nationwide, on BET Networks: a testament that “edutainment” is boundless.

Tamika’s signature piece, her NYU thesis entitled Jackie, will be complete on the autumn solstice.   This seventeen-minute film is the story of an Ivy Leaguer raised in the New York City foster care system who meets her birth mother for the first time.  Jackie examines what we ask of our youth—even after abandoning them.

This is like balm.  True, it is a blog, that unlovely word, and it’s coming at us on a screen, and I was tempted to read it too fast, in that careless way that we consume so much of our small and micro-screen media.  We consume, sork, slurp, suck down, skim, glance, check out, share, go to, look over.

But this blog made me read. Beyond that, I did exactly what Imani writes about doing herself.  I stopped reading several times and let the imagination that she engaged do its thing.  I played for a minute, in my mind. Even my breathing is slower now.

Have a read yourself… – Lorene

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We are houseguests and the floor is bare. Its unvarnished wood planks are more gray than brown. By the time my mother and I have arrived it is already late in the evening. He shuffles about, making awkward gestures at hosting the way aging bachelors often do. But soon enough he leaves us to our own devices in his living room. That is when he retreats off the stage of my memory.

I do not even remember who he was and I prefer not to have my impressionistic recollection disrupted with details. He was a family friend. That is enough. And his bookshelves were tall. They covered every wall I turned to. The books were mostly paperbacks, some arranged appropriately with allied spines of common height. Others were stacked too high, and teetering. Inescapable, the books defined the space.

We slept on the couch, and before us there was a modest black and white television atop a small wood table. After the lights were off the television remained on, as was our habit. Back then in the 1970s, entertainment was not customized. In the small collection of choices available you found something that caught your fancy, either a lot or a little bit. And if you liked it just a little, you let your mind wander and play during the broadcast. Being distracted by your thoughts was a standard part of watching. This made falling asleep to the hum of the television kind of nice. I snuggled close to my mother. The blankets were too thin, especially for an unfamiliar place. The illuminated figures on the television screen cast a dancing glow upon the books surrounding us. TV rays scrolled about, making titles clear, and then recklessly throwing some tome back into obscurity. At night oftentimes inanimate objects haunt us with their stillness. But these books formed a mysterious yet safe cocoon. Even a caver, looking for walls of crystal and ancient drawings would have been wrapped up into this seductive moment. I was less curious about the content of those books (I was a small child after all) than satisfied by their presence. Knowing that many of my unknowns had been documented somewhere, and were waiting for me to discover them, was plenty.

Books, for literate generation x-ers and their predecessors, reminded one that making and telling one’s own stories was always possible. No, not because everyone thought they had a bestseller book inside them waiting to be written. But books were a central form of entertainment, and they could capture your heart without taking up all your senses. And so you got a sense of your own creativity inside them. You write with authors as you read fiction. You make up voices and faces and even the precise color blue when the author writes that the shirt is blue. That was an everyday enjoyment once upon a time.

The same can be said for many other types of entertainments and forms of art. Whose mind hasn’t wandered at a baseball game? And isn’t it the case that we sometimes weep at beautiful music because it triggers an avalanche of memory or longing. Don’t we sometimes find our souls buoyed by a certain painting because we fill it up with what we take it to mean, or even make up the story behind a captivating print advertisement as we ride the bus?

The imagination is a precious gift. She makes an artist of each of us. With her we create and that is a fundamentally human act. But everlasting consumption can drown her out and I am afraid of that. Who ever gets bored anymore? Who is forced to sit with their questions and answers? There are hundreds and thousands of channels and facebook updates and tweets and youtube videos and shows and bits, all clamoring at once, and the territory for making a retreat into the sweet dark interior grows smaller and smaller. We are losing our landscapes to a hypermedia invasion.

Despite what I have said, I greatly appreciate televisual media. And until very recently I was an avid television watcher. But I have slowed over the past two years, to watching a few hours per week. And sometimes I go long stretches without a single show. I was yearning for the comforting mystery of a time when there was often truly nothing to watch, and so I re-created it by narrowing my tastes. Today my walls are lined with books and great big windows. The car and street lights, outside looking in, illuminate the spines erratically. Sometimes I play a game of divination and select a street-highlighted text, open to a random page, run my finger to the middle, and take the words I find as a message. Like these just now:

“Aasha, stricken but tempted towards hope by this brief silence, holds her gaze” (from Everything is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan)

I say we guard the magic of our imaginations in the face of the great invasion. It doesn’t require disappearing from the digital age. Lord knows I adore my iPhone and twitterfeed. This guarding is less like sword and shield protection and more like mopping up a seeping mess or throwing away a sea of paper covering your desk. It is nothing more than making space: A walk in the forest. A paintbrush on canvas. A gaze on a sculpture. A book in hand. A soundless drive. A held gaze. A midnight with a muted television, and dancing bodies of light.

Imani Perry is a professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of two books: More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York University Press, 2011) and Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004.) She is also the editor of the Barnes and Nobles Classics Edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and the author of numerous articles on race, law and culture. Professor Perry holds a Ph.D. and a J.D. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Yale. She is the mother of two sons, and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Follow her on twitter: @ImaniPerry

Here is the intro that John Hough gave at a lovely private reading reception hosted by Sheldon and Lucy Hackney and John and his wife Kate on Martha’s Vineyard. It was the night before my reading at L’Elegance last month, and a glorious green-and-blue evening. John’s introduction speaks generously about how we met, but it doesn’t say that he gave me the most thorough and excellent reading of If Sons Then Heirs that a writer-friend could ask for.

In particular, John helped me to have what my husband calls “the courage of my obsessions.”  I want to write about extended families, people connected on all sorts of ways, across the country and even across time. Among John’s many great calls was his suggestion that I stop re-introducing the many members of my main characters’ extended family.  It was too much.  It stopped the storytelling.  It also revealed, I now see, a lack of confidence in the story.  I want the readers to be immersed in the community, which is sometimes overwhelming.  So, John’s emails urged, “let them.” – Lorene

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A few years ago I wrote a Civil War novel in which race and slavery were dominant themes, and I asked Lorene Cary to read the manuscript. I didn’t know Lorene, but I’d read her excellent novel, The Price of a Child, which is about a slave who escapes and makes her way to a new life in Philadelphia. I was hoping Lorene would approve of the book and maybe even say so.

Lorene lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Penn, and I had a hunch that Lucy and Sheldon Hackney knew her. They did, and Sheldon was kind enough to ask Lorene if I could write to her. She said yes. I did, and she consented, very generously, to read the unpublished novel of a stranger.

The novel begins with a runaway slave, a stowaway, coming ashore off a coastal schooner in what was then Holmes Hole Harbor, a short way down the road from here. The white abolitionist family of my novel takes him in and helps him to freedom.

Lorene liked the book but had some trouble with this first scene. She questioned my depiction of the slave, Joseph Ruffin. She thought I wrote him with a certain condescension.

I looked again. She was right. I was mortified. I rewrote the scene and in emails to Lorene, tied myself in knots trying to explain myself. Clemency came, eventually. I will never make the mistake again.

The correspondence continued. We wrote to each other about race, writing, religion, families, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin. Lorene is ten years younger than I am, and about twice as wise.

If Sons then Heirs is above all a wise novel. The title is from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons…And if sons, then heirs.”

The characters in the novel are the literal descendants of slaves, and they are heirs—if they can manage it—to a number of things: a piece of land, the love that can bind families and retrieve their wayward members, and, finally, to what Lorene would probably call God’s grace—luck that is both earned and granted, and which heals and fortifies us on our journey.

The novel takes place in Philadelphia and rural South Carolina. It is the story of the Needham family, over five generations. The narrative moves back and forth in time, so that all of its characters are present to the end.

Lorene writes terrific dialogue and terrific characters. A stubborn old woman with a large heart.  An inmate at Graterford State Prison who trains dogs for the disabled. A strong and loving man named King who must deal carefully with his neighbors in an era of racial violence. A sad and lovely woman named Jewell.

There’s a painful event in the history of the Needham family, and the question is how to live beyond it, how to go on believing that grace is possible, or even right. A clue to the answer comes from a sweet and quirky old man whose first name is Jones. Hating, he says, is as bad as going crazy.

Besides teaching at Penn, Lorene Cary is founder and director of Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia. If Sons Then Heirs is her third novel and fifth book. She’s a wife and mother, and she teaches Sunday school.

Please join me in welcoming her to the Vineyard.

John Hough Jr. grew up on Cape Cod, which is the setting for several of his novels. He was a speech writer for Senator Charles McC.Mathias Jr. of Maryland and assistant to James Reston at the New York Times Washington Bureau.He has been a columnist for the Martha’s Vineyard Times and the Falmouth Enterprise. His novels include The Conduct of the Game, The Last Summer, and Seen the Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, which won the W. Y. Boyd Award for excellence in military fiction from the American Library Association in 2010.

In case you missed them, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of What’s the WURD?

Our quarterly WURD Speaks event series has been a tremendous success — each of our past 9 events has been sold out. We are currently gearing up for our next event titled “Are We There Yet? Navigating the New Economy, Racial Politics and Election 2012” which will be held on October 25 at The Enterprise Center.

And this September we are excited to launch a series of new programs during our late evening timeslot (7pm-9pm) called “WURD After Dark” as well as a new weekend lineup. Additionally, we are re-launching our web site www.900AMWURD.com with a heightened emphasis on dynamic content and social media.

We will add these new components to our current daytime schedule featuring: “Wake Up With Bill” (7:00 AM – 10:00 AM) hosted by Bill Anderson which is the only show in the market that boasts the Mayor, School Superintendent, District Attorney and Executive Director of the Philadelphia Housing Authority as regular monthly guests; former Daily News columnist and lifestyle blogger, Fatimah Ali (10:00 AM – 12 noon); Rev. Al Sharpton keeps us connected to the national issues from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM; and our own Al Butler holds down drive time from 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM.

These are exciting, yet turbulent times. The bottom line is that the future of WURD, and Black talk radio in general, is in our community’s own hands.  While my staff  and I work hard every day to ensure the economic viability of this business, without the tangible support of the community, it will never be enough. If it is important to have a place to talk openly and honestly about the most pressing issues facing Black folks today, then we have to actively support it, plain and simple.  And there are lots of ways to do just that.

• Patronize our advertisers — It is incumbent upon Philadelphia’s African-American community to engage in economic activism. Be intentional about where you spend your money.
• Join our “900 In 90” membership campaign.
• Listen to the station and encourage others to do the same.
• Attend our October 25th WURD Speaks event (www.900AMWURD.com).
• If you work for a major corporation, advocate that your company advertise or sponsor a WURD Speaks special event.
• Talk about WURD to your family, friends, church, sorority, fraternity, etc.
• Call in and join the on-air conversation – 215-634-8065.

We need to all become stakeholders in the future of this station. Only through this type of widespread embrace, will we be able to ensure that, as Dr. Marable pondered, the authentic voice of Black people will have a chance to be heard.

Sara Lomax-Reese is the president of WURD Radio, LLC, Philadelphia’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She has been the host and producer of HealthQuest Live radio show on WURD since 2002. Prior to her work with WURD, Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, the first nationally circulated African-American consumer health magazine in the country. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Sara’s writings have been widely published in The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Essence Magazine, American Visions Magazine and Modern Maturity.

With an entrepreneurial spirit and creative vision, Sara remains committed to educating, empowering and enlightening the community around optimal health. In her role at WURD, she is able to mobilize all of her experiences, to help build it into a powerful and vital voice for the African-American community.

Now more than ever, it’s clear that we need to have independent media that has the courage to speak truth to power. And therein lies the rub from a business perspective.  How do you speak truth to power when you are reliant on the power structure for your financial viability? This is the delicate dance that all media constantly navigates. For us, we have to always honor the trust we have cultivated within our audience. This means having an unflinching commitment to talking about issues that may make our friends and business supporters uncomfortable. In other words, we must be authentic.

Complicating things further is that today far too many corporations take the Black community for granted. There is a widely held belief that you don’t have to do targeted marketing to reach African-Americans anymore. Instead, if you throw a Black person in a general market TV ad, or have some soulful music in the background of a mass market radio commercial, you’ll get Black folks and White folks without having to spend additional dollars. The proverbial two-for-one approach. And that’s killing Black media.

Add the current economic crisis to the mix where small Black businesses, a traditional base of advertising support for Black media, continue to struggle to survive, and you understand my “endangered species” analogy.

All is not lost, however. To navigate this rocky landscape requires creativity, tenacity, flexibility and patience, which we have in abundance at WURD. Last year we began positioning the company as a multi-media enterprise that includes three powerful channels: on air (900AM-WURD), online, and in the community (WURD Speaks interactive event series).  This has allowed us to begin to structure strategic partnerships with major institutions around the city. Some of these partnerships include Art Sanctuary, WHYY, the University of Pennsylvania, and The Philadelphia Theater Company.  Additionally, we have been successful in attracting such blue chip advertisers as Universal Companies, PECO, Keystone Mercy Health Plan, United Health, Peirce College, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank.

This past June, WURD launched its first ever membership campaign. Titled “900 In 90,” our goal was to get 900 people to contribute $90 to help protect, preserve and build Philadelphia’s only Black talk radio station. This initial program ends on September 6 and has been a tremendous success. We have received an outpouring of support from hundreds of WURD listeners who have expressed how critical the radio station is to their day-to-day lives.

Tomorrow: Part 3 of What’s the WURD?, in which Sara continues to discusses the creative programs and initiatives that have helped to ensure WURD’s success; and a call-to-action for the listening community.

Sara Lomax-Reese is the president of WURD Radio, LLC, Philadelphia’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She has been the host and producer of HealthQuest Live radio show on WURD since 2002. Prior to her work with WURD, Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, the first nationally circulated African-American consumer health magazine in the country. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Sara’s writings have been widely published in The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Essence Magazine, American Visions Magazine and Modern Maturity.

With an entrepreneurial spirit and creative vision, Sara remains committed to educating, empowering and enlightening the community around optimal health. In her role at WURD, she is able to mobilize all of her experiences, to help build it into a powerful and vital voice for the African-American community.

In our community, we so often use the word ‘authentic’ to mean whatever the hell we think is black-like-me. I love that Sara uses Marable’s definition, but I love more that she and WURD live it.

Once, in a WURD interview for my Underground Railroad novel, ‘The Price of a Child’, a man called to say that the book had not adequately represented slavery.

He talked for sometime.  Then, one of the interviewers asked whether he had read the book.

He did not need to read it, he said, and he did not intend to read it.

The interviewers, who knew the man’s voice, gave him a hard time: calling in about a book he hadn’t read; how could he judge anything?

But this is what the caller answered: If I had written a book about slavery that people could sit at home and read–and enjoy–then he knew that in some way, I’d been untrue to the experience.  To be true to it would mean making the book so painful as to be unreadable.

I was on the third floor in my house on the phone, and I thought of Richard Wright saying that after ‘Uncle Tom’s Children’, he’d never write another book that “bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.”  And I thought about my own rage during the five years of research and writing.  I tried to acknowledge the caller’s point, saying that like blues, my books tried to capture the pain and make it into beauty that could hold and honor the past with its horrors.

Only on WURD here in Philadelphia during an entire season of the One Book, One Philadelphia promotion could that conversation have happened, with its emotional, intellectual, and spiritual implications understood, laughed at, humphed over, and listened to deeply. Ours was an authentic conflict, and the context of the radio station and its community made a space large enough to contain us all that morning.

We at Art Sanctuary are thrilled to partner with WURD, too! – Lorene

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“As a black historian, the question that came to me was, “How can the authentic history of black people be brought to life?” By “authentic” I mean a historical narrative in which blacks themselves are the principal actors, and that the story is told and explained from their own vantage point.”

-       Manning Marable, Living Black History

This is a fundamental question for our time: How do we –as Black people – in 21^st century America (a so-called post-racial society), determine, shape and tell our own story in our own voice? The answer for me, right now, is building a financially viable multi-media enterprise that leverages the historic power of talk radio and merges it with community outreach events and new media vehicles like the Internet , mobile devices and social media. But as the brilliant African-American scholar Dr. Manning Marable points out, you must be authentic to be credible in our community.

As the president and general manager of 900AM-WURD, Pennsylvania’s only African-American talk radio station (and one of the few in the nation), we provide the only outlet where Philadelphia’s Black community can discuss, debate and question the issues of the day – everyday. Whether it’s politics, education, health care, economic development or criminal justice, our two-way talk format allows our community to speak and be heard in their own authentic voice.

This sounds basic, but in today’s world this can feel like a revolutionary act. I have had White friends and colleagues look at me quizzically when I say what I do. “Well what do you talk about?” they ask, implying that there could not possibly be anything of value that’s not already covered on NPR or KYW or Action News.

But in Philadelphia, there really is a “tale of two cities.” Too many Black folks are truly suffering. Just look at public education (drop out rate of about 50%); unemployment (around 18%); obesity (about 70% for Black women); stop and frisk and the over incarceration of Black men.  Clearly we have not yet overcome. Add to this equation a more complicated, less open conversation around race and class in the age of Obama, and you see the need for an unapologetic examination of the African-American experience.

This is why I am so passionate about WURD. I have often said that Black talk radio is on the “endangered species” list. Disappearing Voices, a 2008 documentary about the demise of Black radio, illustrates this point poignantly. It states that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, out of 10,315 commercial AM and FM radio stations in the United States, only 168 are Black-owned.  That was three years ago when Disappearing Voices was produced. Since that time, even more voices have disappeared.

Tomorrow: Part 2 of What’s the WURD?, in which Sara speaks to the importance of independent media and begins to discuss the creative partnerships that have allowed WURD to navigate the rocky landscape of talk radio

Sara Lomax-Reese is the president of WURD Radio, LLC, Philadelphia’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She has been the host and producer of HealthQuest Live radio show on WURD since 2002. Prior to her work with WURD, Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, the first nationally circulated African-American consumer health magazine in the country. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Sara’s writings have been widely published in The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Essence Magazine, American Visions Magazine and Modern Maturity.

With an entrepreneurial spirit and creative vision, Sara remains committed to educating, empowering and enlightening the community around optimal health. In her role at WURD, she is able to mobilize all of her experiences, to help build it into a powerful and vital voice for the African-American community.

I am so grateful for the poetry here, and the company.  What a densely beautiful sampling of Debra’s discoveries, over time, through her own family, her husband’s, and help from Nana Selma.

We are all swimming in the same waters, of course, and we tire or lose our way and hang on to something so that we can catch our breath – and catch a glimpse of others heading home. – Lorene

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I now know her birth name: Rena Mae Clay.  I do not yet know how my mother became a Brown, or how grandma went from seven-year-old Rena M. Clay on a farm in Tennille, Washington County, Georgia with her parents, Charlie and Hagar Clay – as evidenced by the 1910 Federal U.S. Census – to carrying a social security card that named her Marena Harris upon her 1981 death after several years of symptoms of senility, increasingly painful arteriosclerosis, and a briefly broken arm in the three-story row home in which I lived with my parents and siblings in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.  What I do also know is that a day trip to Trelawny, two-and-a-half hours away from my mother-in-law’s Spanish Town, Jamaica home where I had traveled with my husband so that he could assist his mother in obtaining a government required TRN (taxpayer registration number), and my simultaneous reading during the nine-day vacation of the efforts of Nana Selma (If Sons, Then Heirs) to preserve the land rights of the Needham family heirs, has brought me to this place of trying to trace myself black and back to Africa.

I had been to Georgia, only armed with the excitement, anticipation, and curiosity that comes with the week-long vacation of a twenty-something-year-old on a first-time flight from Philly, with Gloria, my best friend since seven and Gloria’s older sister, Cheryl. My fleeting thought when I landed in Atlanta, before heading over to Peachtree Plaza or Peachtree Street or Peachtree Avenue, was: Mom was born somewhere in Georgia.  Even though I had seen and loved the mini-series, Roots, a few years before, I had not wondered whether a Kunta Kinte or Kizzy might be found in my family of clearly “colored” people on my mother’s side.  But now, with only five days remaining on a free fourteen-day trial membership on Ancestry.com, I may have discovered that grandma Rena Mae Clay became the widowed Rena Harris, before the birth of my mother; and that she may have roomed in the Maryland home of a Negro woman, before arriving in Philadelphia.

Differently than the twenty-something-year-old emotions I carried on my Georgia vacation over a quarter century ago, on my next trip I will be armed with the excitement, anticipation, curiosity, and glorious memories of the Trelawny visit complete with the behind-the-house gravesite of my husband’s grandfather, a concrete slab marking his existence, and my older and wiser fifty-four-year-old self listening to Nana Selma’s voice in my ear saying: I been swimmin since time began.  One day I’m gonna swim back to Africa.

Debra Powell-Wright is a published poet, spoken word artist, and first-time blogger.  Her essay, Four Women–For Women: Black Women All Grown Up, is featured in the Carol E. Henderson anthology Imagining the Black Female Body.  Recipient of the March 2011 Leeway Foundation Art & Change grant, Debra anticipants publishing a collection of short stories and poems written by women of color, from residents voluntarily relocated from Philadelphia to temporary residents of a Philadelphia shelter.  To promote her collection, Debra plans to follow the tips of fellow blogger and author Tina Smith-Brown, who is also one of the contributors to For Women: A Tribute to Nina Simone.

Saturday evening, as Irene rolled through, sprinkled gray and blowy, and the threatening dark sucked into it the last hope of vesper light, trees began to throw their heads back and forth.  We insisted our daughter come home earlier than she would have liked.  I’d talked to my sister earlier; they were holed up in Martha’s Vineyard, storm vets and not afraid.  My mother was with our cousin in the Bronx; my father and his girlfriend had water and a plan for the basement; our older daughter in Vermont had texted to check on us.  So, we walked the skittish dog, locked the door, closed windows, dragged mattresses downstairs, and went into a fitful sleep, waking through the night, checking the windows, listening to the storm.

On Sunday morning, when the rain stopped and the cool wind blew through us in gusts, it felt like late September or early October, like the day when I was about nine and ate the first bowl of split pea soup for the season in my grandmother’s den.  Time shuffles itself with invisible fingers of memory, and I realize that I want to write about our lives together with my grandmother in light of her last year and a half, when she lived with us.

In his sermon at Evening Prayers, Bob said that for people who love the water and live next to it, there’s always the threat of storm.  When he said it in the small blue-and-white chapel, my mind saw our favorite beaches and walks and bird sanctuaries by Cape May Point; then I saw the swirling icon of Hurricane Irene on the newscasts.  That’s the way it feels to love people.  You have the delight and comfort and ease of love—and then, as Francis Bacon said of taking on a wife and children, you’re given “hostages to fortune.”

When I receive acupuncture, sometimes grief surprises me. Dr. Nancy Post will insert a needle for pain, and tears will slide out of the ends of my eyes. I am like Dostoevsky’s organ stop.  Just like that.

“Why?” I ask.  “Why am I so sad?” Who am I asking?

Like standing water in the basement, grief pools around knotted muscles and organs. I bail in my sleep and do not let myself know.  But in the quiet after Irene, I feel it:  the swirling, flood-storm of mourning that blew through, and then the gusts.  Now two years later, I hope that if I do not stop the process, there can be, there will be, a slow, drying out.  Grief has puddled in my body.  Writing is the practice that lets me express it.

Bob put up the feeder this afternoon.  I saw the hummingbird waiting on the forsythia for me to leave the back door so that it could feed in private.  At a Harlem Book Fair panel, Marva Allen of Hue-Man Bookstore asked about our next projects, and I said that I didn’t know.  I’ve wanted to go to live and work in Ghana, to visit the forts, to smell the inland, walk the beach to learn the other side of the Middle Passage.  I want to research Harriet Tubman in New Jersey.  I want to learn about filmmaking, if I’m not too old.  And for two years I’ve been jotting scraps into a file and titled it from a phrase our daughters used for caring for my grandmother.  Writing’s not worth it for me unless I pick the right topic for the particular moment in life.  I did The Price of a Child when I was pregnant with my younger daughter. And If Sons, Then Heirs after running a non-profit business.  As I watch the storm water recede, I know it’s time to begin.  The girls used to say that they were:  Ladysitting.