DISQUS

There are plenty of hsitorical stops all over the country. The DuSable Museum in Chicago; Booker T. Washington's home and the George Washington Carver Museum at my alma mater, Tuskegee University in Alabama; musically and socially historic stops from Memphis to Nashville and Birmingham to Montgomery; the Muhammad Ali Museum and E & S Art Gallery in my adopted home town of Louisville, secret stops along the Underground Rail Road in Cincinatti, right across the Ohio River from Kentucky, various points of interest in my original home town of St. Louis, the site of the famed Dred Scott case.

Great choices no matter where you go, especially if you have an extended break and string a few stops together as a cultural road trip.

Good idea Eugene. We're going to have to do something like this for the Lindsey household one year.

And oh yeah, Black Enterprise propaganda is the only propaganda worth reading. They get a thumbs up from me too.

Great points Eugene. I grew up in a Black neighborhood in St. Louis and graduated from Tuskegee University but I learned early on that networking is networking and connections are connections no matter what direction they are coming from.

Anyone can be a friend who looks out for you purely just because of who you are and the character impression you make on them.

So, even as a lover of Black institutions of all sorts, I've learned not to be narrow minded about opportunity. You never know who will be providing it. And definitely don't be a conspiracy theorist and try to guess people's underlying motivations. First of all you can't do it and secondly who cares. Like one of my favorite church songs says, "What God has for me, it is for me." He rules us all, not just African Americans.

Continue to urge young Black collegians everywhere, be they at HBCU's or other campuses, to soak up everything that looks like a connection during their co-ed years. You never know who you'll bump into years down the road 10, 20 or 30 years from now, who used to be a school mate or intern buddy between the ages of 18 and 22, who can open a door for you later. Or maybe you'll be the one.

Happy holiday weekend to all of you at the YBP crew.

Marty

Well written Eugene. I didn't know you were a professional. What's your full time gig!

Agreed, Ash. Up with mentoring!

We're always flying on other people's wing drafts and it's easy to do for others. We just have to be intentional with our mentoring and menteeing.

A continuing "wow" for you Gaurav. You're up to # 58 most faved today.

Congrats.......Martin

Hey there folks. My name is Martin Lindsey, author and creator of MartyBLOGs. I have added everyone on the list to my Technorati Favorites. Please add me to your Technorati Favorites, read my best post and subscribe to my feed as well.

Thanks....Martin

Fredric, I've heard a lot about Firefox lately. Can I import my exporer settings (favorites, folers etc) directly into it?

Thank you for saving me a post Tambra. The "litany of excuses" from the African American entertainers and the old "keep our dirty laundry to ourselves" mentality that we hold on to are the biggest jokes we have going. Thanks for airing out those further points in detail.

Fredric, I didn't know you were a Wash U grad. My mother got her music masters from there years ago long before they closed the music department.

I'm proud of my young homeboy writing his own ticket to campuses of his choice. Let's hear it for us St. Louis public school grads! Nah, that's just good parenting from his mother.

Great post Kimberly. Glad to see Bob leveraging his funds for something beneficial to the populace.

And about those check cashing/payday loan shark shops! I try to keep the language clean but Single Ma did a post on those places yesterday or day before. She calls them FMLs. I'll just leave you to guessing on that one. It'll crack you up when you figure it out.

So Fredric, what is the CBC's planned partnership with FOX? I haven't been keeping up with it.

I don't necessarily agree that pulling out of their agreement is the smart thing to do. Although FOX may have blown it on this series of reports ,(are people really tripping off of whether a smoker should be President?) as if a person's name and school attendance actually matter in the 21st century, in general they really are the only truly balanced network out there.

No, people, they are not a Republican mouthpiece. They are the only one out there consistently and intentionally giving equal political viewpoints on issues. They are the only network I can stand to watch. I have no time for the big three because they are a big joke.

It's only the tradional networks that can be truly accused of having any political leanings and those are obviously liberal with no balance whatsoever.

However, I do agree that the sense of civility in American culture is in the toilet but it's not new friends. It's been in the process of taking a dump for the last twenty years.

And let's not not forget that the CBC doesn't have clean hands either. They aren't even all inclusive of Black congresional legislators because they won't allow for Black conservatives. J.C. Watts was an opportunity missed for them. They seriously blew it. Now there's something that's important to me. Where's the balance with the Black politicians with each other? Major issue for Martin.

If there's one thing the African American populace can't stand or survive is intentional political isolation. Life is about giving yourself options, remember? Haven't all of our parents told us how destructive it is to pigeonhole ourselves? Didn't mom or dad tell you from time to time "don't put all your eggs in one basket"? They told you that so you wouldn't make it a life habit to limit yourself.

Yet as African Americans we do it politically and on purpose. Somebody explain to Martin how that makes any sense. We can't afford to be dedicated to one side or the other. We need to be involved in both major parties. I'll even go this far. The DNP (Democratic National Pimp) is killing us and collectively we are their political whores. Nothing would be better for us as a demographic than a mass shift from one side to the other.

Let's go back to Dr. King again. He didn't talk about isolation. He talked about working together co-operatively. He was striving for inclusiveness. You can't stop doing that just because of a network or a couple of public personalities that drop their shorts and show their butts.

Yes, Imus is an idio and I'm glad Rev. Sharpton is rippin' him a new one. And Gingrich likes to put a new pair of shoes in his mouth every few years. Those types have to be taken to the woodshed and be given a public beat down. Fine, no problem.

I think the only way for FOX or the Congressional Black Caucus to pick up their faces and begin to regain their credibility though is to go ahead and proceed with their plans for the campaign season.

Changing things on the inside is often as effective or more effective that doing so from the outside. Yes, wrong must be corrected but there are effective and ineffective ways of doing so. Just one guy with a dissenting opinion on this one.

Must be one of those weeks. Here's what I read in the local paper first thing this morning. The link is from the Opelika-Auburn News. Beauregard is a small town here in Lee County, AL just outside Opelika. As it turns out the big after-school fight at their high school the other day was motivated by racial graffiti in the school building.

http://www.oanow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename...

You may have to cut and paste it into your browser depending on how it shows up in the comments.

As a proud former student member of NSBE - and a former engineer career wise - I'm glad you got some much form our conference. Never made it to a national conference but the regional ones were powerful in their own right. I admire you man. Keep on packing in as much traveling and life education as you can before you hit thirty.

At that point you'll really begin to leverage it well because you'll have nearly a decade of working life, experience and connections under your belt. Then you'll be a person of influence. You're headed in the right direction young bro'. Keep doing more!

I couldn't find a blog on Tavis' home page , http://www.tavistalks.com , but I sent an e-mail with this blog link to one of his producers, Denise Pines, at dpines@tavistalks.com . I asked her if Tavis could investigate and publicise. Why don't a few more of you try to jam up her in-box so Tavis definitely gets the word on this one?

Tom Joyner's Express Yourself forum on Black America Web is offline at the moment but try again tomorrow sometime at http://www.tjms.com and see if we can get Tom and Sybil to give it some journalistic research and discussion on their end. This isn't one of J-Anthony's "hidden racism"s. It's out there all the way!

The Tom Joyner Morning Show and all of Tavis Smiley's venues. This young lady needs big media attention and serious legal aid.

Why don't we all forward this link to those guys on their blogs? I'm going to search them out and get back to everyone on it.

If anybody can get more details and give attention it's Tavis, Tom and crew.

Kim, I think the laserlike self sufficiency is right on point. Unfortunately the younger Tavis Smiley's and Jesse Jackson Jrs of our world are still playing the game in the old inneffective political-only style of the older generation's Cornel Wests, Al Sharptons and Jesse Jackson Srs.

You're right. We need more "individual" economic initiative in order to actually make a change and have an impact on our "collective" community. I'll always believe economics is the best politics.

And yes leveraging web 2.0 is the way to get it going. What you - and our British friend in the previous comment - are suggesting is PanAfricanism 21st century style.

Unfortunately we're 50 years behind the eight ball because Dr. King was talking about this before he was killed and most publically prominent leaders since then have acted like it's an irrelevent subject.

I'm with you. I think it's on our younger web 2.0 generation to actually get this type of thing jumped off. The question is the "how" of it. Fortunately we have the Black Enterprise Economic Summit as an example. Unfortunately though - and correct me if I'm wrong - from what I saw of the show Earl Graves wasn't one of Tavis's panelists.

Have you considered contacting the Tom Joyner Morning Show or Tavis Smiley directly and posing your premise? I think now is the time and there are many of us who share this perspective.