Chef Govind Armstrong and restaurateur Brad Johnson invite one of the nation’s most heralded chefs, Marcus Samuelsson, into the kitchen at their Baldwin Hills restaurant Post & Beam to create reinvented soulful classics for one night only on Tuesday, February 26, 2013. The guest chef dinner, Red Rooster at Post & Beam: A Taste Of Harlem in Baldwin Hills commemorates Black History Month, and is ticketed at $140 per person (inclusive of tax and gratuity), featuring dishes that draw inspiration from each chef’s diverse cultural roots and chef ideology.
Continuing their commitment to the local neighborhood, Post & Beam will donate a portion of proceeds to benefit the Los Angeles chapter of C-CAP. C-CAP, Careers through Culinary Arts Program, works with public schools across the country to prepare underserved high school students for college and career opportunities in the restaurant and hospitality industry.
WHEN:
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Seating: 7:00PM
Reservations Required
Red Rooster at Post & Beam: A Taste Of Harlem in Baldwin Hills is a ticketed affair and can be purchasedvia:atasteofharlem.brownpapertickets.com
In honor of Black History Month, I would like to remind some and expose to others the words of one of the greatest defenders of justice this world has known; Frederick Douglass.
In 1852, Douglass is asked to give a speech as part of the Fourth of July celebrations in Rochester, New York. Douglass accepted the invitation.
In his speech, however, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.
Enjoy.
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, “may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth”! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July!
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate, I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just….
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply….
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
It’s only proper that within the disparity of our community there are even a range of views on a topic like Black History Month. Here is an article that was shared with me, and is authored by CSUDH professor Dr. Sharroky Hollie.
WHY ARE YOU STILL CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH? Meaningful Cultural Responsiveness
by Sharroky Hollie, Ph.D
There is nothing more debilitating to the cause of the institutionalization of cultural responsiveness than the celebration of Black History Month. Indeed, superficial celebrations of culture that focus solely on ethnic identity actually demonstrate more of an under-appreciation of culture than they do an enrichment of culture. The message we send to youngsters is for these twenty-eight days, Black culture, history, and heritage matters, but we do so without answering the question what happens on March 1st. Of course, March is Women’s History Month. By not doing so, we are unknowingly modeling for our students how to undervalue heritage, ironically.
Those who continue to celebrate Black History Month and other said cultural holidays have wrapped their cultural responsiveness in a superficial cloth. For them being culturally responsive is merely about celebrating holidays, dead but heroic people, and surface cultural elements like music, foods, and historical trivia. You know how it goes: play some cultural music, wear cultural garb, eat cultural foods and play cultural historical factoids, then call it a culturally responsive day.
If don’t believe in what I am suggesting, then would you consider the vision of the creator of Black History Month, originally known as Negro History Week? Dr. Carter G. Woodson did not intend for this “celebration” to go on this long. He and others began a call to America to honor all of its history in 1915 with the thought that schools would adopt the knowledge and methodology to instill for the entire school year eventually. Why? He understood fully what it meant to be culturally responsive. Culture is not something that you celebrate during a designated month, week, or day. Culture is celebrated all the time.
So heed this warning, if you are not planning on celebrating culture all year long in meaningful and authentic ways, keep Black History Month. Something is better than nothing. The dilemma for most schools, churches, and community organizations is how does celebrating culture the entire time look. In short, the answer lies in first believing that culture matters on a deep level, that how we see the world comes through a cultural lens, which is typically a combination of our family, community, and heritage (generational). Secondly, the complexities of culture have to be understood and accepted. Ethnic identity is only one type of culture. We, as human beings, are comprised of many identities that are culturally based. Therefore, we have cultures directly related to our gender, religion, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education level, sexuality and so on. Lastly, the celebration of culture goes beyond pictures, stories, movies, and assemblies. The celebration is actually a respect that demonstrates how we interact with one another as adults and how we interact with the students in our classrooms, discipline offices, counseling services, and on athletic fields. Adults and students should feel honored, appreciated, valued,validated and affirmed every single day for who they are culturally. The call is not so much to end celebrating Black History Month, but to begin celebrating all cultures all year long, just like Carter G. Woodson desired.
As we celebrate February as Black History Month, my mind keeps wandering to the thought of who we were before slavery. As Africans in America, our history has always started with slavery – and no information is ever volunteered about our history prior to this country. We’ve all seen depictions of Queen Nefertiti and King Tut and have been told that royalty runs through our veins but for most of us, concrete evidence of our past remains a mystery.
While we continue on in this post-millennium society if often feels like we are moving further and further away from that mysterious past, so much so that the information we would seek seems out of our grasp. One of my goals for this month is to face that challenge and to see what information (if any) I can find about our past – and not the same information that’s been retold over and over. I’m curious to know more about the customs of various African tribes, their systems of government, family structures, and what a day in their lives looked like. My hope is to unearth some of this information and share it with you. Since Black Is is a communal space, I am hopeful that many of your will share what knowledge you have with us as well.
As always, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements of Black people in this country, especially those that don’t receive any recognition at all. Let’s continue to work together in making new history of our own.
Chef Govind Armstrong and restaurateur Brad Johnson invite one of the nation’s most heralded chefs, Marcus Samuelsson, into the kitchen at their Baldwin Hills restaurant Post & Beam to create reinvented soulful classics for one night only on Tuesday, February 26, 2013. The guest chef dinner, Red Rooster at Post & Beam: A Taste Of Harlem in Baldwin Hills commemorates Black History Month, and is ticketed at $140 per person (inclusive of tax and gratuity), featuring dishes that draw inspiration from each chef’s diverse cultural roots and chef ideology.
