Author Archives: Rosalind Cummings

Step into Yo Mama’s cafe on Milwaukee Avenue and you’ll be greeted by Mama herself. “How ya doin’ honey,” she coos, flitting around the granite and marble tables, taking orders and giving a few herself. “Oh, you should give me that ring girl,” she tells a customer. In red lipstick, earrings, and nail polish and […]

“Kwanzaa does not substitute for Christmas,” says Oba William King. An actor and poet, King has organized the third annual Poetic Kwanzaa Celebration, an evening of poetry, music, and dance. “We’re not looking for replacements. It’s an African American end-of-the-year, harvest celebration gathering family and reflecting on the year’s accomplishments. It doesn’t compete with Hanukkah […]

Robin Kissinger thinks Cuba is the promised land. During a ten-day tour there last year, the south-side factory worker glimpsed a country he’s convinced holds the answers to the world’s problems. “You have to be deeply political to understand Cuba,” he says. “If you believe newspaper accounts, they say it’s crumbling. But what’s happening now […]

Bernard Williams counts billboards, Spiderman, baroque Italian portraits, and “those paintings you see at the end of Good Times” among the influences that have shaped his ten-year career as a painter. Then last year he saw a video on Wassily Kandinsky at the Terra Museum. The way the music on the sound track connected with […]

“‘Ball of Confusion’ by the Temptations really set the pace for rap,” says Chicago writer Scoop Jackson of the 1970 hit. “It was the structure of the song, the speed, the repetitive lyrics. They were verbalizing and rhyming at a pace that really hadn’t been done before. The politics behind the lyrics stood out. The […]

Every year the Haile Selassie I Birthday Celebration offers rolling reggae rhythms and spicy Caribbean food beneath fluttering red, gold, and green Ethiopian flags. This year, after 17 years as one of the biggest reggae festivals in the midwest, the two-day celebration is attempting to return to its spiritual foundation. “We want to have it […]

It’s Tuesday and the night is crazy muggy and a crowd is gathering in front of the Bop Shop on West Division. B-boys and girls in their late teens and early 20s are standing in slouchy jeans and backward-turned caps talkin’ and trippin’. The mad bass of A Tribe Called Quest is rippling out from […]

There were two holocausts. The one that is acknowledged and commemorated and the one that has long been hidden: the Ethiopian holocaust. “Mussolini attached spraying mechanisms to planes that the pope blessed and sprayed poisonous mustard gas over Ethiopia,” says Imani Nyah, organizer of the Ethiopian Holocaust Remembrance Committee. “This happened three years before the […]

Whether as a 10-year-old DJ “toasting” over popular records or a photojournalist for the Kingston Daily Gleaner covering the rise of “rebel” sound in the 70s, Ephraim Martin has always championed reggae music. Ever since he arrived in Chicago in 1982, he’s organized and run two annual reggae events, the Chicago Reggae Awards held each […]

Sam Greenlee is relaxed. He sits lotus style on a rainbow-striped blanket, rolling cigarettes and talking in reflective, short streams about the rage that fueled his 1969 underground classic The Spook Who Sat by the Door. “I planted the seed and I’ll live to see it grow,” says Greenlee. The seed was a portrait of […]