I watched the DNC meeting on Saturday and this one little snippet stood out…Donna Brazile has always held my respect because she is committed to the party and bases her decisions on such. She is the first Black woman ever to manage a presidential campaign, serving in this capacity during Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run. She is an activist, an author, and an educator, but most of all, she is the truth.

Listen to her speak and tell me that you don’t garner a moment of respect for her during her definition of “playing by the rules”:

video credit: originally uploaded to YouTube on May 31, 2008 by NCDem

She has remained neutral during this campaign season, and has said: “Look, I’m a woman, so I like Hillary. I’m black; I like Obama. But I’m also grumpy, so I like John McCain.” I choose Ms. Brazile as an Icon because she shows a level of commitment that is admirable, and a neutrality up until this date that has been hard to maintain, I’m sure. But her integrity remains front and center, and this woman deserves recognition for all the work that she has done in the area of politics, and for being instrumental in successfully campaigning to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday. Ms. Brazile is a powerhouse, and she uses her power for good, not evil…that is something that we all can look up to.

 

I found this list over at Black Perspective, and being the avid book reader that I am, was instantly intrigued…how many of these books have you read? The ones that I have read are bolded and in color:

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Some of these I read during high school; some just on my own, and I’m sure that I’ve forgotten most of them. The reality is that most of these books are true masterpieces and the reason for their “ban” is ludicrous. The reasons for banning include troubling ideas regarding race relations, man’s relationship to God, unfavorable depiction of people, unfavorable depictions of governments, etc. The Bible is included in this list, people…Thank God we have come a long way since the days of banning books to the freedom to read what we like, regardless of the subject matter…

Looks like I’ve got a list of books for the summer; I’m hitting up the library! What about you? Let me know what you are currently reading…

OBW is my baby; I started blogging in 2006 as a simple release of my pent-up feelings and emotions she was born from that. I have loved all of the friends I’ve developed through OBW, and all the associations and memberships I’ve developed.

But the time has come to retire OBW; I think because she has become tired and it is showing. I feel reckless and non-directed and that she has lost her voice; so retirement is in order.

Fear not, fellow bloggers and friends…I am not leaving the world of blogging; I happen to love it too much to stay away. OBW will be rolled over into a newly formed view of the world from my eyes: The Marvalus View. With my new site, I hope to establish a direction that made me fall in love with blogging in the first place: speaking on things that stoke my passion.

Renewal is not new to me…I am in a season of renewal in my personal, professional, and spiritual life that is changing me in ways that I cannot imagine. The spirit of change is upon me, and I must embrace it and move with it. The change is inevitable and moving towards me fast; it is my choice to welcome it and I do!

So I ask all of you who are loyal readers of this blog to follow me to The Marvalus View. I am giving up all of the past associations I have developed in hopes of developing new ones, although there are some that are too good to let go! If you are so inclined, please change your bookmarks to reflect the change in my site.

OBW will remain up but the new posts will be over at TMV beginning today. You will also be able to find the archives of OBW there after this site is taken down permanently. I want to thank all of you again for your readership and friendship.