Word: african
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...just change that. The books date from between the 14th and 16th centuries, a time when the town was a thriving trading hub and intellectual center for West Africa. Now, scared that Timbuktu's 50,000 or so surviving books might disintegrate or be sold off to foreign collectors, African and Western organizations are racing to salvage the treasures, preserving them from the ravages of climate, dust and the passage of hundreds of years. Millions of dollars have been spent in laborious conservation and cataloguing of the works. A sleek new museum, completed last April, is scheduled to open...
...reactions—on July 16 is why you would have chosen, as I've heard you put it elsewhere, to "talk Black" to Officer Crowley instead of "talking White" as you so eloquently and regularly do? These are distinctions I've heard you expound—how educated African Americans switch their register of speech depending on what part of themselves they want to get across. Many of us do something similar inside and outside our particular communities, but you make it sound like a sport that is also for African Americans a tool of survival. So why didn...
...1930s and '40s. The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. The word's origins are disputed - some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others think it comes from the West African word hipi, meaning to open one's eyes. But gradually it morphed into a noun, and the "hipster" was born...
Moving Beyond Murder A small but passionate band of Booker critics is standing on the steps of Newark's city hall early one evening, rallying against a city plan to create a municipal water authority. Among the agitators is Amiri Baraka, a prominent, controversial African-American poet and activist. Baraka, 74, has won a trunkful of literary prizes but was essentially stripped of his New Jersey poet-laureate title after penning a post-9/11 poem that was denounced as anti-Semitic. The writer, who was reared in Newark and still lives in the city, is a voice from...
...President, he shuns teleprompters) and the eagerness to engage that carried Bill Clinton to the top. Unlike Clinton, Booker sometimes needs to read crowds a bit better. At a community event, he dropped a reference to the television show Frasier while playing Simon Says with a few dozen African-American kids and their parents. (Frazier was the last name of one of the participants.) The kids were mystified...