Christal Cooper
*All photographs are labeled with description and copyright at the very end of the piece.
Excerpts
granted copyright privilege from Patricia Spears Jones and White Pine Press
Patricia Spears Jones:
A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems
A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems
“The Salvation In Art!”
“When horrible things happen, people don’t run
to prose, they run to poetry because it has that ability to connect powerful
emotions with ideas in one package. It can happen in prose, but when you really
want to get down to it, it happens in poems.”
--Patricia Spears Jones
Today our country abides in a state of
chaos. Political parties are broken; our
government is considered untrustworthy; and our peace officers are viewed as
aggressors. The spirit of the middle
class is fading and the rich – as always – get richer. This is today – but this is also yesterday
–especially in the lives of African Americans in these United States.
How do the disenfranchised enjoy
self-empowerment in mainstream American, and still maintain the memories of the
injustices perpetrated against their fathers and mothers? Should they maintain these memoires or should
they deny the whippings, the brandings and the selling of their bodies
wholesale? How can people of color
embrace the past, live in the cultural present, and still maintain individual
power?
These questions that must be
answered. And Patricia Spears Jones does
that in her poetic collection A Lucent Fire New & Selected Poems
(White Pine Press November 10, 2015. http://www.whitepine.org)
Jones
illustrates the turmoil the disenfranchised endure and its effect on
individuals and the surrounding community.
But Jones doesn’t stop there. She
recognizes the possibility of maintaining an identity of power without having to
betray a past of identity of oppression.
And the medium that makes these points a
reality is art. Jones explores these
possibilities in verse, but Mary Baine Campbell describes Jones’ connection to
all art forms in the book’s introduction.
“In this again Jones’ world resembles the real world, that place
of intersection of all our lives and visions and creations (and alas,
uncreations). And again, in line with
the value of aliveness that orients this collection, from “Early” to ‘New and Uncollected,”
the arts make their appearance most often through the medium of artists, alive
and in motion. The moving, singing,
typing, painting, acting, street walking, drinking, loving, shopping, thinking,
shoe wearing characters of Lucent Fire
include Billie Holiday, Rita Hayworth, James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone,
Sylvia Plath, Kara Walker, Lynda Hull, Marilyn Monroe, Thulani Davis, Mary J
Blige, Borges, George F Hunt, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Etta James, Aretha Franklin,
Kurt Cobain, Fellini, Fats Domino, Rodgers and Hammerstein (and hart), Mabou
Mines (http://www.maboumines.org) , the Wooster Group (http://thewoostergroup.org/blog/), Godard, Neruda, Mishima, Beuys, Lecan, Diamond Galas,
Akilah Oliver . . .”
There are eight sections to this book,
and they include poems from her books: Early
Poems (consists of Mythologizing Always
1981 Telephone Books), The Weather That Kills (June 1, 1995
Coffee House Press http://coffeehousepress.org),
Femme du Monde (June 7, 2006 Ta
Chucha http://www.tiachucha.org), Painkiller November 30, 2010 Ta Chuchua http://www.tiachucha.org), Repuestas (2007 Belladonna Books http://www.belladonnaseries.org/books),
Swimming to America (2011 Red Glass
Books), Living in the Love Economy (2014 Overpass Books www.overpassbooks.org), and New
and Uncollected Poems.
Early
Poems
“Mythologizing Always: Seven Sonnets Change in
Seasons or The Break-up Sonnet VII” sets the stage of the state of unrest in
the past and in the present.
There
are scars always
Faithful
clicks on the psychic metronome
A
shiver in the limbs perhaps
A
grimace just before the smile
In the last stanza, Jones offers small
protective measures the disenfranchised can take in this state of unrest:
But
holding on to the dead is worse
You
move on/move away
Let
your shoulders carve a space for some sky
And
you don’t ever, ever look back
For
fear those Biblical tales are true
And
you never could stand the taste of salt.
“The
Mythologizing Always” sonnets and “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues” are examples
of how compelling poems can mean something totally different to the reader than
the poet intended.
In
an email dated August 10, 2016 Jones wrote:
“Hello Chris – interesting
interpretations. The sonnets are about a
love affair and while your interpretation could mean others, it is really about
the loss of romantic love.
‘The Birth of Rhythm and
Blues’ is about my mother—her voice and Holiday's are explored in that poem
and it is very specifically about my birth (by Caesarian).”
From The Weather That Kills
In “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues” Jones speaks
through Billie Holiday, of the men who have betrayed her, but the below verses
also describe the condition of African American women.
A
Black woman’s life is like double jeopardy.
All
you win are dreams for your children
and
the right amount of lies to make waking worthwhile.
The
next verses describe Holiday’s view of the world as a little girl; it also
could describe the working class’s view of America today:
For a world larger than the screen door
that slams
early
morning, and the reeking breath of a man once handsome and
friendly
And then it hits you. This poem is not limited to the voice of Billie
Holiday but includes voices of Professor Longhair, Big Boy Crudup, Ruth Brown,
Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, Otis, Etta James, Little Richard, all who have
fallen into oppression by a system of white privilege – through the use of the
evil caesarian:
A
noble operation for Caesar used for a poor Black Woman
already
wanting to break this wall, as hand claps break a forest’s silence. Uterine wall collapsing,
so
they cut my mother’s belly and drag me out
wailing
too.
In the second stanza of “In Like Paradise/Out
Like the Blues” we learn of one artist’s way of giving hope to the downtrodden,
through his painting.
2.
After
Rufino Tamayo returned from mapping
the
Cosmos, he returned to his wife and said
Stars
are like flowers in the desert.
They
shiver fresh in the aeon knowing
that
they will become memory, hunger,
the
core of dreams.
It
is up to me, then, to bring back their beauty:
taut,
seamless before the eyes of men and women.
To
amplify the vitality of their illumination
(righteous
shimmer above melancholy clouds)
To
remind humanity that without them night would never come.
In the third stanza, a couplet, Rufino Tamayo lives through Jones, and reveals that it is possible for something to be
ugly and awesome at the same time. If
this is possible, maybe it is possible to hold on to an oppressive past
identity and still maintain an identify of power?
3.
The
death of a star like the death of a flower
Is
awesome, ugly, a relentless warning.
And this great dichotomy can only be accomplished
through art, and it is through this art, that makes the dreams of equality come
into fruition.
4.
4.
Artists
make whole somehow the ways
In
which dreams persist.
Each of us turns to the hunger of stars
And
wipes the crumbs from our mouths.
On canvas, they laugh like children.
On canvas, they laugh like children.
In
essence, they scream like children
And
struggle like children to eat, grow, copulate, then flash out
A
name perhaps. A body gone.
From Femme Du Monde
In the poem “Saltimbanque” there are
different individuals who use variety of art forms to change his/her perspective
of life, to unify, and to resist their oppressors.
In a November 27, 2015 interview with
Barbara Henning of The Poetry Project
Newsletter, Jones goes into great detail about the writing of “Saltimbanque.” Jones had been working as Director of
Development at the New Museum where she was content and happy.
But all of that changed when she learned that
Toni Cade Bambara died at the age of 56.
Jones felt the muse leading her to quit her job and to focus on her
poetry, which she did three months later.
“In the
meantime I got the residency at Virginia Center for Creative Arts for the month
of April. I got there and slept for three days. I was so worn out. When I woke
up, I started reading things at random and there was this book by T.J. Clarke, The
Absolute Bourgeois. That’s
when I started thinking about the position of artists.
Also 1848
is fascinating to me because it’s that year where there were revolutions and
rebellions all throughout Europe and they were all put down and they were harbingers
of things to come. And there were slave rebellions, many big ones in the U.S.
and probably in South America although I don’t know that history.”
Banners
dirty and torn, fragmented song sings air.
Why
are the revolutions of 1848 present?
Weapons
in the hands of peasants, slave rebellions
in
the American South, the monarchy crisis,
Plutocrats
measure their new-found power in gilt, silk, velocity.
“Also,
there was a French speaking artist there so I talked with her and realized that
Daumier was the perfect figure. He was popular and he was a famous artist, but
he had this whole cache of paintings he couldn’t show because they would have
just kicked his ass into jail.”
Suppose
Daumier had behaved differently? He
walks across
Paris
uneventful. News banal – barricades,
congresses,
the
secret societies ineffectual. What would
his cartoons reveal?
The
fat bellied bourgeois slimmer? The
masses
stepping
into well-made shoes?
Or
would he have – as he did in private – made more paintings
of
the saltimbanques: street performers
suppressed,
by
order of the State?
“So this poem is about what it means to
resist. What does it mean to restrain
oneself? How do you figure out how to undermine power? What will the powerful
do to you?”
Were
their songs too political, pornographic?
Had
their children not received instruction from the priests?
Were
their dancing dogs and wily monkeys better off
Burned?
Have
we not enough water?
Is
there not enough air?
“The saltimbanques were the street
performers, whole families with animals, monkeys, etc… and the French are such
great bureaucrats. They outlawed working with animals and performing children.
A significant number of them starved to death including the animals they worked
with. All of this was done because they were street performers and their songs
were not sanctioned by the state.”
Sous
les paves, la plage
Songs
of freedom scorch parched throats.
Workers
and students defy enforced alienation.
Rise
together, spray police with pamphlets, curses,
on
the very paving stones that once were danced upon
by
the saltimbanques, their children,
and trained beasts.
There
is the art form of hero worship – and it is through this hero worship that artists,
intellectuals, and idealists unify to create their own armies of resistance.
While an ocean way,
under an image of the ever-defiant Che,
intellectuals,
idealists, the disaffected rallied across
a hemisphere.
In
the last line of the fifth stanza poets express their power through words,
debates and learning to handle guns.
In the mountains of Central
America,
poets purged themselves
in clear, cold streams,
debated desire, and
learned to shoot.
Sous les paves, la plage.
Stanza six presents the violation of the
disenfranchised:
6
On
a road to Biafra, in the slums of Manila,
on
the back streets of Kingston, inside the chain-linked lawns
of
South Los Angeles, people make a song, new song, riot song
as
a stockpile of promises collapses the shanty towns,
miners’
camps, the migrant workers’ buses traveling north
from
Florida seats sticky with overripe oranges.
Under
the pavement, the beach.
Under
a stockpile of rotting promises, human stench
Bodies
gunned down in daylight in Manila, Mexico City,
Memphis,
Tennessee. Cameras chasing children
grabbing
a solid taste of fire.
And
earlier that year, Soviet tanks pressed
against
The
Prague Spring, a winter storm drowning flowers.
Stanza seven is what the world’s response
should be – through the example of Martin Luther King Jr.
“I wanted to place King in
jail, to show his deep humanity in the face of oppression, but also to show how
he like those performers was codified by the state. I mean Martin Luther King
got his ass kicked too, in many horrible ways.”
7.
Martin
Luther King Jr. sat bleeding in a Birmingham jail. He worked
his
mind along the sacred stations of the cross and found,
if
not solace, then the tattered cloth called dignity,
as
he prayed for the souls of his jailers.
“But I also wanted the
position of the clown, the saltimbanque,
the performer to be revered— that it is one of powerful ways to resist. Why else
does the state do so much to regulate ‘entertainment?’ We have to put on
another face so we can continue when we leave the jailhouse behind. I wanted to
give him that.”
Tracing
Alabama dust, his cross just heavy enough o bear,
Word
could have been miracle, joy, power.
It
was likely to have been song, people, or alone.
He
made, in private, a face mimicking the fat, snuff-dipping guards.
Clown
face turned towards jail-floor dust
His
tears roll away holy laughter. Saltimbanque
In
a moment of amazing tenderness and pure rage.
From PAINKILLER
In “Failed Ghazal” the speaker of the poem is sitting
in a Brooklyn living room with the scent of roses and ginger where she has a
memory of eating Chinatown ginger cookies in 1975 San Francisco. She searches New York’s Mott and Mulberry
streets for the same cookie. The scents
and the cookies represent a culture that the speaker of the poem is trying to
recapture now living in Brooklyn.
By the third stanza we know this is an elegy to
Poet/Playwright
Peter Dee.
He
sculpted poems and plays where his characters, many of them
children took chances large and
small to find ways to be
tender, loving, despite
abandonment, despair, the world, the
world, the world.
In
“Notes for the Poem, “Beloved of God”/A Memory Of David Earl Jackson” she
remembers David Earl Jackson as well as the elderly African American men who
managed to survive the prejudices inflicted upon them.
I
now know why I have always respected aging Black men
To
have defied the bullets ever ready to find their targets,
These
are men of immeasurable luck. The sixty-something gentleman
on
the 4 train, Friday morning, his voice still Georgia rich, schooling
a
younger Black man.
She particularly remembers the victims of police
brutality, now symbols of the Black Lives Matter Movement:
Here
we are at the start of a new century, in the Year of the Dragon,
and
we look back to a tangled history of blood desires and blood
letting
or
denial and lies. The violence
consequences of white supremacy-
four young men
raised
in fear and marked by badge and gun with the chance to
lose
sight of mission and common sense in the shadow of a doorway
where
every boogeyman story crystallizes in the body, mind, and
heart of a
young
African man doing nothing in particular.
Toward the last stanza she tells how African
Americans should respond to this travesty, especially when denied justice.
We
live. We do not become so foolish that we think we cannot
change the world.
We
remain as open to new ideas and as defiant of old expectations
as that aging man,
still
angry and still working to make a difference that I heard on the
No 4.
There was nothing specific about David Earl
Jackson – suggesting that when one person is disenfranchised it affects the
whole community
Savoring
the beauty of noise, gossip, anxiety and joy,
We
pour libations and we remember who has been sacrificed and why.
We
celebrate half a century of moving on terra
ferma,
Dancing
away from the bullets.”
From REPUESTAS
This is the shortest section of the
collection and consists of three poems in which Jones converses with the great
legendary poet Pablo Neruda.
In the
second poem “Y Cuando se muda el paisaje, son tus manos or son tus guantes?” Jones
describes gardening as an art form and compares that to the theatrical art of
set directing – creating a scene for a better world.
“And
when you change the landscape, is it with your bare hands or
with gloves?
I
changed the landscape with gloves on
I
hate dirt beneath my fingernails
I
like manicures, but that’s another poem
Oh
yes the theatricality of scene setting is pleasing
like
a rain storm’s beating the hard green of magnolia leaves.
From SWIMMMING TO AMERICA
In “Mary J Blige Sings “No One Will Do’
Jones pays tribute to Mary J Blige and James Brown.
In the poem she divides the world into two parts – James Brown’s world the Soul Nation, and the world that oppresses, the Soul Less Nation.
In the poem she divides the world into two parts – James Brown’s world the Soul Nation, and the world that oppresses, the Soul Less Nation.
This
behavior continues to shock citizens of SOUL LESS NATION
Busy
as they are with their markets, markers, and ministers without
portfolio
They
see only the smiling countenances of miserable men and women
Oh
so folkloric in fake fur floor length coats, rhinestones and hot
pants.
SOUL
NATION gives up poly rhythms and an occasional orgasmic
Shriek.
Jones empowers the disenfranchised, through the
words of James Brown.
GET
UP OFFA THAT THANG and make yourself feel better
GET
UP OFFA THA THANG and change the shape of weather.
Then Jones urges those disenfranchised to
appreciate the Ambassador of soul “who brought us the ache and art of Black
America, claiming”
Patriarchy
of funk and feeling just about as good
as you can get
When
you walk a walk so defiant, every one wants to sample your
will.
From LIVING IN THE LOVE ECONOMY
In “Day After May Day” Jones acknowledges the
great dichotomy of justice and injustice.
Life
is full of injustices large and small
but
also moments of tenderness and regard
Her solution is once again – art in the form of
music, the beauty of the sky, and the chanting of prayer:
But
on a chilly May Morning, U2 on the CD
I
can see the Ox’s half moon horns
the
peacock’s blue to green
and
the cups petal shaped edges.
And
offer one more prayer to the God of Friendship.
In “Family Ties” Jones is unemployed,
middle aged, and in debt with no new prospects. In an interview with Henning she said she was
laid off from her non-profit job that she held for ten years. Family and friends gave her encouragement,
but she was facing reality – she was a black woman, middle aged, and having a
difficult time to get people to even respond to her resume.
“It was horrible. Everybody I
knew had someone who lost work in their family or been cut back or didn’t get
the raise they should gotten.”
My brother is nervous, my lack of employment
Wears on him, my Mama, and my baby sister.
They are nervous. I am nervous too. Day to day
Hour by hour. My heart
rate rises. And it keeps raining.
If I could just gain a toehold, shove a door, find
My clichéd Plan B. Oh,
but I am my own Plan B.
Jones responded through her plan by expressing it boldly in poetry.
Poetry on scraps of paper.
Poetry on the side table.
Poetry is the realm of the possible, where middle-aged
women find love and work and great apartments
Jones told
interviewer Barbara Henning that this crisis in her life turned her to write
her poetry collection Living in the Love Economy.
“I’m very proud of the
work I did in Living in the Love Economy because those poems also track
not only me, but also my neighbors.”
I
aspire to a better situation; a different position.
To
that day close in the possibility of later
as
poems rip through much ordinary mutter
and
the clutter of paid bills and plans for travel.
From NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS
In “Wearing Mr. Song” Jones pays tribute to the
hat (designed by Luke Song) Aretha Franklin wore at President Barack Obama’s Inauguration.
The poem is packed with compelling moments: the power of the African American Woman, cultural changes that allowed an African American Man to be President, and finally, an anthem dedicated to all the artists Jones wrote about in this collection – though many are now dead – it is because of them this moment in “Wearing Mr. Song” is now a reality. And last but not least we are an America in need of change, capable of change, and will change for the betterment of all humanity.
The poem is packed with compelling moments: the power of the African American Woman, cultural changes that allowed an African American Man to be President, and finally, an anthem dedicated to all the artists Jones wrote about in this collection – though many are now dead – it is because of them this moment in “Wearing Mr. Song” is now a reality. And last but not least we are an America in need of change, capable of change, and will change for the betterment of all humanity.
Wearing
Mr. Song
So
what if her voice is just a half beat ahead of the taped
Strings
swelling somewhat over the Mall, all these people
All
this color, a dash of cold to keep everyone awake
And
sing she did wearing a gray chapeau from Mr. Song
How
righteous is that? The trim, just so.
How
righteous is Aretha early morning, so damn happy
A
President who looks like a skinny version of her brother,
A
second cousin, an old boyfriend. The
helpful guy at the bank.
How
can you think the Lord better than that preacher from
California
Who
seemed to think he was at some crystal palace, the walls
Cracked
And
crumbling under the weight of his bigotry?
Truth is told.
She
will have none of that. Oh no. She sings “sweet land of liberty.”
Voice
crackles in places where once it climbed fearless of octaves
It
is still her voice. She’s still
Aretha. This is America.
And
things do change. And change can come.
When
it needs to.
CONCLUSION
In A Lucent Fire, Patricia Spears Jones
exposes the atrocities and conflict, and, she gives empowerment to those living
in these terrible circumstances. The
disenfranchised and those championing the disenfranchised have the power, through
art, to change their world: whether it
is picking an orange; designing a hat; singing; dancing; playing music;
painting; writing; acting; sculpting; reading; uplifting those who defy the
oppressors; praying to a Higher Power; and yes – even poetry.
Photograph Description
and Copyright Information
001
Left: Patricia Spears
Jones at the Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Attributed to Janet Goldner
Attributed to Janet Goldner
Right: Jacket cover of A
Lucent Fire
002
Patricia
Spears Jones.
Attributed to Rachel Eliza Griffiths
003
Patricia Spears Jones, second from left, participating in a poetry reading in 1977.
Attributed to Richard E. Powell
Attributed to Rachel Eliza Griffiths
003
Patricia Spears Jones, second from left, participating in a poetry reading in 1977.
Attributed to Richard E. Powell
004
Patricia
Spears Jones visiting Atlanta as a Rhodes College senior.
005
Jacket
cover of A Lucent Fire
006
Advertisement
of poetry event Patricia Spears Jones took part in.
007
Mary
Baine Campbell
Web photo Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Web photo Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008a
Rita
Hayworth, originally from Brooklyn, NY in 1947
Public
Domain
008b
Sly & the Family Stone in 1969, photographed by their
photographer and A&R director, Stephen Paley. Clockwise from top: Larry Graham, Freddie Stone, Gregg Errico, Sly Stone, Rose Stone, Cynthia Robinson, and Jerry Martini. A similar photograph was used as the cover of Rolling Stone #54 (March 19, 1970).
Public Domain
008c
Sylvia Plath in 1967.
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008d
left, “The Means to an End A Shadow Drama ion 5 Acts” Fair Use Under the United States Copyright
Law
right, Kara Walker’s Facebook photo. Fair Use Under the United States Copyright
Law
008e
Poet Lynda Hull
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008f
Marilyn Monroe in 1953.
Public Domain
008g
Thulani Davis
Web photo Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008h
Jorge
Luis Borges in 1951. Public Domain.
008i
right,
Church Lady Holy Bible
008j
Thomas
Sayers Ellis
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008k
Kurt
Cobain performing at the 1992 MTV Music Awards
CCBYSA 30
CCBYSA 30
008l
Federico
Fellini. Public Domain
008m
Fats
Domino performing in Germany in 1977
Public
Domain
008n
Rodgers
& Hammerstein
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
008o
Jean-Luc
Godard at Berkeley in 1968
CCBY2.0
008p
Yukio
Mishima in 1956. Public Domain
008q
Joseph
Beuys giving a lecture in Achberg, Germany 1978
Photograph
attributed to Rainer Rappmann
008r
008s
Diamond
Galas performing in QE Hall in London.
Attributed
to Andy Newcombe
CCBY
SA 20
009a
Jacket
cover Mythologizing Always
009b
Jacket
cover The Weather That Kills
009c
Jacket
cover Femme du Monde
009d
Jacket
cover of Painkiller
009g
Jacket
cover Living In the Love Economy
010
“My first publication
(Mythologizing Sonnnets) when I lived on 95th and Riverside
Drive. I still have the beaded
bracelets. The sculpture now sits on my
living room window still.”
014
Patricia
Spears Jones giving a poetry reading from A Lucent Fire
015
Patricia Spears Jones in the 1980s
Attributed to Gene Bagnato
017
Billie Holiday in 1949
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress Public Domain
019
Billie Holiday as a little girl, age two, in 1917
Public Domain
021a
Henry Roeland Byrd aka Professor Longhair in the 1970s
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
021b
Arthur Big Boy Crudup
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
021c
Ruth Brown performing in 2005
CCBY2.0
021d
Aretha Franklin in 1967
Public Domain
021e
Mahalia Jackson in 1962
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress
Public Domain
Public Domain
021f
Otis Redding performing in a trace ad for his single “Try a
little tenderness” in 1967
Public Domain
021g
Etta James performing in Deauville, France in 1990
CCBYSA30
021h
Little Richard in 1967
Public Domain
023
Rufino Tamayo in the process of painting
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
024
“Sandas” Watermelons
Oil on Canvas
Attributed to Rufino Tamayo in 1965
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
025
Rufino Tamayo Mexican Artist in 1945
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress Public Domain
029
Left, jacket cover of The Poetry Project Newsletter Issue
December January 2015/2016 in which Barbara Henning’s interview of Patricia
Spears Jones appeared.
030
Toni Cade Babara
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
031
Left, web photo of T.J. Clark, Fair Use The Absolute Bourgeois
032
Painting The French
Revolution of 1848, depicting the Battle of Soufflot barricades at Rue
Soufflot St. on June 24, 1848
Attributed to Horace Vernet
Public Domain
034
Left, Honore Daumier in 1850; attributed to Vicotr Laisne/Laine
Public Domain
Right, Gargantua,
lithograph by Honore Daumier, Public Domain
036
Patricia Spears Jones taking a selfie of her favorite hat story
in Harlem on a hot summer day in 2012.
038
Family of
Saltimbanques
Oil on Canvas
Attributed to Pablo Picasso
Public Domain
040
Che Guevara at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre
explosion.
Photo taken on March 5, 1960
Photo attributed to Alberto Korda
Public Domain
042
Alberto Granado, left, and Che Guevara, right, aboard their
“Mambo Tango” wooden raft on the Amazon River.
The raft was given to them as a gift from a colony of lepers Granada and
Guevara had given medical treatment to.
June of 1952
Public Domain
044a
Manila slum during Typhoon Ketsana’s landfall on the Philippines
2009
CCBY20
044b
Bird’s eye of Kingston, Jamaica after the 1907 earthquake
Image attributed to the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
Public Domain
044c
Image of South Central Los Angeles where most of the April 1992
riots took place.
CCBY20
046
Martin Luther King Jr in 1964
Public Domain
047
Martin Luther King Jr’s mugshot at his arrest in Birmingham,
Alabama in 1963
Public Domain
049
Martin Luther King Jr speaking at an anti-Vietnam War rally at
the University of Minnesota, St. Paul on April 27, 1967
CCBYSA
051
Typical American style fire escapes in Mott Street (Chinatown)
Manhattan.
Attributed to Hu Torya
CC BY SA 3.0
056
Black Lives Matter die-in protest at Metro Green Line against
allegations of police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Attributed to Fibonacci Blue
CCBY20
058
Stop the
violence image in Brooklyn
Image attributed to Patricia Spears Jones.
062
Left, Pablo Neruda as a young man. Public Domain
Right, Pablo Neruda recording his poetry at the Library of
Congress in 1966. Public Domain
063
Image of flowers in Patricia Spears Jones’s Brooklyn
neighborhood.
Attributed to Patricia Spears Jones
065
Mary J Blige and James Brown
Both performing in Hamburg, Germany - Blige in 2000s and Brown in the 1970s
Both performing in Hamburg, Germany - Blige in 2000s and Brown in the 1970s
075
Patricia Spears Jones
078
Patricia Spears Jones surrounded by Poetry at a bookstore.
080
Copies of Living In the Love Economy
081
Image of Patricia Spears Jones’s Brooklyn neighborhood
Attributed to Patricia Spears Jones
083a
Mr. Luke Song
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
083b
Aretha Franklin wears the famous hat at President Barack
Obama’s 2008 Presidential Inauguration
Public Domain
083c
President Barack Obama
Public Domain
085
Patricia Spears Jones standing in the doorway of Chartwell
Booksellers, an independent bookstore owned by Barry Singer.
Photograph attributed to Barry Singer.
