SO MUCH TO CELEBRATE BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVE FLYER CONTENT

Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") & Kuumba-Chicago African American Holiday Calendar

Present

"SO MUCH TO CELEBRATE:

BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVE WITH POET LANGSTON HUGHES"-SET IN SACRED JAZZ

Featuring Reformation's Kuumba Theater Ministry & Imani Sacred Jazz Ensemble

Sunday, January, 31st, 2016, 5 pm-8 pm at SHoP-South Side Hub of Productions-1448 E. 57th Street (Blackstone & Harper) Artistic Director, Ms. Laura Shaeffer 

VIP Reception Honoring Justice Bertina Lampkin, Judge Leonard Murray, & Judge Robin Shoffner 

Plus: Minister Michael Paul Anderson, Artist, Entrepreneur & Advocate 4 Education  

Admission: Free and open to the public

$10 voluntary donations accepted either online via brownpapertickets.com or at the door

Contacts: Rev. Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), 773-499-3323; Deacon Marsha Washington, 773-996-1066; Dr. Patricia Howse, 773-552-4917; or Michael Paul Anderson, 312-834-5755

Why We Jam Together Langston Hughes' Works & African American Holiday Celebrations

The one word answer is relevancy.

James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967) emerged-from 1920 'til his untimely death in 1967-as the unchallenged poet laureate of African America.  More, he was honored by his peers (Africana writers in the US, continental Africa, and the Black Diaspora) as the first modern Black freelance writer to earn his living solely by his professional work. 

Hughes was the par-excellence story teller, praise singer, and griot of the Black American people in his day.  His body of work thereby constitutes a popular artistic resource for invoking the cultural memory of the African community in America. 

Accordingly, Hughes' work is a major contribution to African American identity formation.  This identity formation remains critically important within Black America in this era when what Dr. Cornel West, of New York City's Union Theological Seminary, calls: "the Black (American faith-based) prophetic tradition" (and Black identity culture and politics generally) is under assault by a misleading "Post-racial" thrust in the U.S. public square.   

More importantly Hughes' work takes his audience immediately into the life of Africans in America over time.

This said Hughes' elevation of African American life through Black literature, and creative production generally, takes his audience face-to-face with the national-popular history of a people's struggle to be free (on ever higher levels of development) without it needing to be mediated through ice cold facts and dates.

In Hughes, African American men, women, and youth come alive in their diverse strivings not matched by straight historiography.

For Kuumba Calendar, then, Langston Hughes' creative production work is a resource to build on and not merely a reference library somewhere collecting dust on a shelf. More, it is a basis for providing a mode of much needed African American pastoral care (which Kuumba Calendar has taken up as our overall cause, reason for being, and partial foundation-emergent as we are as a faith-based creative publishing and performance arts ministry).

Note: By pastoral care we mean, given our African American identity formation context, Kuumba Calendar aims at the cultivation of African American souls i.e., the institutionalized exhortation that Africans in America (individually and collectively) accept their God given identity and history as a distinctive people in U.S. society and the world and be themselves.

Respectfully submitted: Pastor Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Special Transitional Pastor for African Descent Congregational Renewal, Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") & Kuumba-Chicago Blogger

Where We Begin-2

Although we are co-hosting a MLK Holiday Business Breakfast January 18, 2016, at Reformation Church-Chicago on the Far South Side (organized by Pastor Anthony Williams), the key activity of Kuumba Calendar is that of commemorating the Eve of Black History Month Sunday, January 31, 2016 and the Eve of Langston Hughes' 114th birthday (5PM-8PM), at SHop-South Side Hub of Productions-1448 E. 57th Street (Blackstone & Harper) Artistic Director, Ms. Laura Shaeffer.

Accordingly, our program format and theme is:
"SO MUCH TO CELEBRATE:" BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVE WITH POET LANGSTON HUGHES-SET IN SACRED JAZZ. 

This said, our program features Reformation Church-Chicago's Kuumba Theater Ministry showcasing its Imani Sacred Jazz Ensemble-both of which are hallmarks of Reformation's ministry to Chicago's Africana artistic and activist communities.

More, a VIP Reception follows our planned performing arts presentation.  It will feature Justice Bertina Lampkin and Judge Leonard Murray as Kuumba Calendar's special holiday guests of honor.

More still, our planned Black History Month Eve celebration seeks to partner with Minister Michael Paul Anderson, artist, Black popular culture educator, and vendor, now promoting the 50th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's moving to Chicago's West Side Black community- signaling his Northern inner-city intervention in the African American racial and social justice movement.

Respectfully submitted: Pastor Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Special Transitional Pastor for African Descent Congregational Renewal, Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") & Kuumba-Chicago Blogger   

Where We Begin

As Keith Mayes, Professor of Africana Studies at University of Minnesota, Twin Cites, indicates the mother vain of the year round African American Holiday tradition is the dateline alley from January 1 through April 4 (our addition).  That is to say a swath of major commemoration dates as follows:

A) The Seventh Day of Kwanzaa-January 1;

B) The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend-following January 15;

C) Black History Month I (General Focus)-February; (The Kawaida Afrocentricity philosophy suggestion)

D) Black History Month II (Women Focus)-March; (Again a Kawaida suggestion)  and

E) The April 4 Martyrdom of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This said, the Kuumba Calendar project annually begins by programatically raising up the above major commemorations and other significant dates in between such as Black Love Day, Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, Langston Hughes', Frederick Douglas', and W.E.B. DuBois' birthdays, the Martyrdom of Minister Malcolm X-all in February as well as the Celebration of Haitian Independence, January 1 (or early during that Month). 

Respectfully submitted: Rev. Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Special Transitional Pastor for African Descent Congregational Renewal of Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") and Kuumba Chicago Blogger. 

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE ARE ABOUT-1

Kuumba-Chicago African American Holiday Calendar (KAAHC) is a counter cultural date book serving the Africana community in the U.S. from its home base on the South Side of Chicago.   

As such we are rooted in the African American alternative holiday tradition that is today more than two centuries old.  

KAAHC, or simply Kuumba Calendar, serves as an ongoing critique and corrective of the common Euro-American civil calendar itself rooted in the Western Church Gregorian calendar tradition, that, due to its historically flawed systemic and institutionalized White supremacy and racism, consistently functions to marginalize the history and culture of African Americans and other peoples of color inside and outside the U.S.  

Kuumba Calendar is an expression of African American "self-determination, self-respect and self-defense" (to borrow a clarifying phrase on the three objectives of Black Power-from the Kawaida Afrocentricity philosophy for racial and social justice-founded and developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga, Creator of  the Pan-African holiday Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba, and Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at California State University-Long Beach).

Kuumba Calendar's general objectives, suggested to us and adopted by Kuumba Calendar from University of Minnesota Professor Keith A. Mayes, author of KWANZAA (Black Power and the Making of the African Americn HolidayTradition), are: 

1) "to (help) provide visibility and a public voice to African Americans (in the Metro Chicago area especially but not exclusively);"  

2)  to (help) "perennialize" the African American struggle for racial and social justice-locally, regionally, nationally and globally;

3) "to (help) annually affirm (Black) History (and culture);" and

4) To (help) "annually assess" where African Americans are as a people in U. S. Society in general, the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois particularly. 

Respectfully submitted: Pastor Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Special Transitional Pastor for African Descent Congregational Renewal, Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") & Kuumba-Chicago Blogger