Black Studies on Twitter

Ok, ok...finally caught up and got Black Studies on Twitter. Finally. So much new media and so little time, it seems, to adapt or at least to keep up. Fortunately, I'll have my black studies crew helping me out.

Here's our first tweet:

We wish to tweet our own cause; too long have others tweeted for us. [<--remixing Freedom's Journal http://bit.ly/4xh417]

It's a remix to those often quoted lines from the first issue of Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper. The editors Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm wrote "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us."

I first heard those words from Freedom's Journal at a lecture on the campus of Lane College, during the summer of, wow, 1994 when I was preparing to enter my senior year of high school. The speaker was this historian, Dr. Hornbuckle, and he was dropping this expansive, animated people's history of black folks.

At some point in the talk, he got to the story of Freedom's Journal and those memorable lines. All these years later, the lines and year of publication (1827) stuck with me.

Of course, the style of my opening tweet was inspired by Colson Whitehead's cool remix of Ellison.