KEW
LightNews LightNews
banner
kidadaewilliams.com
KEW
@kidadaewilliams.com
3.8K followers 380 following 2.2K posts
I read, tell stories, block early/often, mind my business, and write--I SAW DEATH COMING is now in paperback.
Posts Replies Media Videos
kidadaewilliams.com
Midtown Detroit businesses plan new holiday experience amid Noel Night hiatus www.freep.com/story/money/... Love the pic of Flo boutique owner, Felicia Patrick
An impeccably styled, older Black woman, Flo Boutique owner Felicia Patrick, stands in her glorious Midtown Detroit store, surrounded by hanging clothes and in front of an orange-painted wall filled with Black art.
November 12, 2025 at 11:34 AM
kidadaewilliams.com
Scoring the public record with cowards’ names and practices across industries—academia, journalism, law, government, business, banking/finance, & medicine—will make it harder for them to conceal their involvement or claim ignorance. 🗣️Help ensure people now and in the future know who they are.
Visual quote featuring a headshot of an African American man (the one and only Ta-Nehisi Coates) holding a pencil and looking at the camera. The quote is from a recorded discussion. It reads: “Havard…is sitting on what—$40 billion? And you can’t oppose this man? Columbia, you can’t oppose this man? Either you’re cowards or you’re with him. ABC News, CBS—all these people just rolling over…Someday we will come out of this…[we always do. And if you’re not here for that...] Tell your children who the cowards were.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates
October 28, 2025 at 10:17 AM
kidadaewilliams.com
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Screenshot of text: "If [TFG] has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit."
September 27, 2025 at 5:47 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Another ABST: “Creating Knowledge to Save the Republic”: Howard University Press and Academic Publishing in the Era of Black Power by Magana J. Kabugi www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Screenshot of text: Abstract This article examines the Howard University Press (HUP), the first fully functional and staffed academic publishing operation headquartered at a historically Black college or university (HBCU). In the decades before the HUP’s relaunch in 1974, after two iterations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, multiple HBCUs attempted to publish scholarly works that advanced the study of Black diasporic culture, history, and social thought while also pushing against anti-Black ideas propagated by White-controlled university presses. From 1974 to 2011, the HUP published or republished a diverse catalog of texts, ranging from historian Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) to conversations between writers Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni. By drawing upon oral histories of past HUP employees, archival collections, newspapers, magazines, and intellectual histories of Black Power thought and activism, the present article provides a granular understanding of the HUP’s significance in the landscape of Black-owned and Black-led publishing.
September 23, 2025 at 12:36 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Article ABST: “Sport Becoming an Art”: Curricular Dance, Cultural Pride, and Community Engagement at HBCUs by Emma Hawk. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

If I can Interlibrary loan this article, *YOU* can Interlibrary loan this article.
Screenshot of text: Abstract "Throughout the twentieth century, dance instructors at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, championed an innovative and holistic pedagogy, recognizing dance’s history as a vehicle for celebration, resistance, and self-expression in African American life. Often assigned to physical education departments, these instructors imagined dance as a “sport becoming an art,” with the capacity to stimulate students’ bodies and minds in tandem. The instructors used movement to teach their students, primarily young Black women, social responsibility and a sense of cultural pride. Beyond campus, HBCU dance instructors led community-based workshops in their home cities and embarked on regional tours with extracurricular performance troupes, contributing to desegregation efforts throughout the South and elsewhere in the United States. Focusing on programs led by Charles Holston Williams of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Maryrose Reeves Allen of Howard University, and Mozel Jenkins Spriggs of Spelman College, the present article reveals how HBCUs enabled instructors, students, and audiences to think differently about the body’s capacity for communication and self-expression during periods of heightened political stakes and cultural revolution."
September 23, 2025 at 12:15 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Screenshot of a newspaper article. Reprinted from late editions of last week: CHELTENHAM — Maryland’s Hell Hole __ Former Inmate Tells of Skeletons in the Walls, Secret Burial Plot, Brutal Beatings, Peonage, and Other Atrocities at Maryland’s Reformatory. An article published in the Afro-American (newspaper) on Sept 29, 1934. (Maryland Historical Trust). WaPo article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/22/house-of-reformation-graveyard/
September 22, 2025 at 7:41 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
At least 230 Black boys and teens died while in the care of the House of Reformation between 1870 and 1939, according to a review of state records, news reports and death certificates. This tally is likely an undercount because key records are missing for many of the years analyzed.
Screenshot of table of known deaths: Known deaths at House of Reformation At least 230 Black boys and teens died while in the care of the House of Reformation between 1870 and 1939, according to a review of state records, news reports and death certificates. This tally is likely an undercount because key records are missing for many of the years analyzed. This chart shows that at least 230 children died while in the care of the House of Reformation between 1870 and 1939, according to a review of state records, news reports and death certificates. This tally is likely an undercount because key records are missing for many of the years analyzed. 1870-1879 19 1880-1889 32 1890-1899 73 1900-1909 34 1910-1919 34 1920-1929 14 1930-1939 24 Source: House of Reformation Annual Reports, Prince George's County death records, archival news clippings Katie Mettler / THE WASHINGTON POST
September 22, 2025 at 6:14 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Former DJS secretary Vincent Schiraldi, whose team launched the restoration effort before he left the administration earlier this year, said the state [of Maryland’s] decades of neglect amounts to a “deep level of depersonalization and dehumanization.” He continued...
Screenshot of text: “The history of institutionalization is to rob people of their personhood, and I cannot think of a better example of it than taking children, some of whom hadn’t even committed a crime, some of whom were 10 years old, having them die in custody and burying them in a potter’s field, and not acknowledging it,” [former DJS secretary Vincent] Schiraldi said. “That is not just robbing them of their personhood while they were in our care and custody, but even after death.”
September 22, 2025 at 6:12 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Screenshot of text from: "You cannot fight asymmetrical power by pointing out logical fallacies, or violence, or politeness, or compassion. You can only fight it by refusing to abide by its logic — and, over time, by offering a vision of a different way of living, a different way of orienting ourselves towards the world and others, that is more compelling. Not just for people who believe exactly what we do, but for everyone. I’m not suggesting we give up on the fight. I’m suggesting we start fighting a very different one. ●AHP, "The Reaction is Asymmetrical,” 9/14/2025
September 14, 2025 at 2:44 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
"Some students come to college 4 an education, & others simply for a credential.” The latter’s "truth will come out—that they will *flatline* in their careers because life in the real world will expose their reliance on shortcuts, cunning & cheating.” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view... #edusky
A screenshot from an article on a professor’s resolve for handling a student's AI f——y. The text reads: "I will use this case in future classes as an object lesson and a warning. But I’ve also come to terms with the fact that some students come to college for an education, and others simply for a credential. The former will learn how to research, think critically, identify patterns in culture and history, and synthesize large amounts of material—which is exactly the type of mindset that will enrich our society and help them succeed. As for the latter, I have confidence that their truth will come out—that they will flatline in their careers because life in the real world will expose their reliance on shortcuts, cunning and cheating."
August 1, 2025 at 11:08 AM
kidadaewilliams.com
From www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/o...
Screenshot of a lesson from Frederick Douglass, Jamelle Bouie imparted, that’s useful for evaluating RW parasitic behavior: "For Frederick Douglass — the great abolitionist and thinker whose political philosophy was shaped by republican thinking — virtue includes self-respect, cultivated through education, and self-reliance. “Liberty has its manners as well as slavery,” Douglass wrote to the Black abolitionist and journalist Martin Delany in 1871, “and with those manners true self-respect goes hand in hand with a just respect for the rights and feelings of others.”
July 20, 2025 at 2:29 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
We tried to tell y'all!!! www.bloomberg.com/news/article... "young workers who hold a number of much-maligned humanities degrees—including English, history and philosophy—are all more hirable."
Screenshot of what humanities faculty have been telling you people for a while: "If you’re looking for a tech job, you might be much worse off. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, graduates in computer science, computer engineering and graphic design all have unemployment rates at 7% or greater; young workers who hold a number of much-maligned humanities degrees—including English, history and philosophy—are all more hirable."
July 17, 2025 at 4:55 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
I just spotted this Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. poster featuring this quote in his book this week. Thanks for the reminder.
Full speech: www.blackpast.org/african-amer...
Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s letter press poster featuring a quote from Frederick Douglass’s 1857 speech, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress.” The text reads: "The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Source of quote: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/ Other prints in Kennedy’s excellent book, Citizen Printer.
June 28, 2025 at 7:24 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Barbara Christian said long ago, www.jstor.org/stable/13542... Black folk, “have been a race for theory.” How could we not be? #blackthought
Screenshot of text from Barbara Christian’s 1987 article, "The Race for Theory.” The text reads: "For people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with the language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive which such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity? In women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world. It is this language, and the grace and pleasure with which they played with it, that I find celebrated, refined, critiqued in the works of writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory — though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure that is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative."
June 22, 2025 at 11:26 AM
kidadaewilliams.com
“It was Not the 'News' that Traveled Slowly [to Texas in June 1865]—it was [Military and political] 'Power,' [to finally Break Slavery's chains there]" Christopher Wilson www.zinnedproject.org/news/junetee... #Juneteenth
Quote: “As with an incarcerated prisoner who may be told she's free, until the prison bars are unlocked that word only results in theoretical freedom.” Christopher Wilson
June 19, 2025 at 1:02 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Thanks to a history of resistance that included eavesdropping and the 'grapevine telegraph,' most enslaved Black people learned for the Emancipation Proclamation and other emancipation orders early on.
Quote: "While enslaved black people in far off places like Texas were often kept in the dark and fed a pro slavery narrative of the events of the war in the nation, whether they received word of the order wasn't so much the point." Christopher Wilson
June 19, 2025 at 12:57 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
From historian Christopher Wilson's “It was Not the 'News' that Traveled Slowly—it was 'Power.'” www.zinnedproject.org/news/junetee... #Juneteenth
Quote that reads: “Very often Juneteenth is presented as a story of ‘news’ of the Emancipation Proclamation ‘traveling slowly’ to the Deep South and Texas, but it was really a story of power traveling slowly and the freedom being seized." ~Christopher Wilson
June 19, 2025 at 12:48 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Back in October, the City of Newburgh (NY) unveiled a historic marker for an African American Burial Ground discovered under and around the current City Courthouse wrrv.com/newburgh-to-...
An image of a flyer from the City of Newburgh, NY African American Burial Marker Ceremony, which was held Oct 2024. The invitation reads: join us as we commemorate the African American burial ground located at 300 Broadway. This event serves as a reminder of our past, an educational opportunity for our present, and a commitment to building a more inclusive future. The bottom part of the image includes a photograph of seven African Americans (two elderly women, 1 younger woman, and a girl, and a elderly man, 1 younger man, and a boy) standing in front of a building posing for the photograph during the Civil War Era.
June 15, 2025 at 2:30 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
The way I cackled.
Cybertruck graveyard—a picture of a half dozen cybertrucks parked in a dying SE Michigan strip mall. 🤣
June 12, 2025 at 8:49 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that."
Screenshot of text instructive for these f--d up times. Text reads: “There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.” Quote attributed to the Andor character Karis Nemik.
June 8, 2025 at 2:36 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
"Perhaps everyone is just waiting on someone else to start something that they could ignite themselves." prismreports.org/2025/06/03/i...
Screenshot of another insightful graph in William C. Anderson's essay, Another way out: Fighting back against inaction. The text reads: "Perhaps everyone is just waiting on someone else to start something that they could ignite themselves. Who among us is willing to risk life, freedom, and much more in an attempt to be a spark? Far too many among us want to be the management, influences, or self-appointed vanguard, thinking they’re supposed to direct the revolutionary actions of others. It’s silly to see in a place where the left has been beaten into a place of posturing and rhetoric."
June 3, 2025 at 7:12 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
"Revolutionary change is not ordered like a meal or some product online. It is also not voted in by exporting decisions to a representative. It is fought long and hard and won through persistent struggle." prismreports.org/2025/06/03/i...
Screenshot of an insightful paragraph by William C. Anderson, in Another way out: Fighting back against inaction." The text reads: "Revolutionary change is not ordered like a meal or some product online. It is also not voted in by exporting decisions to a representative. It is fought long and hard and won through persistent struggle. It’s the same struggle that we’re supposed to carry forward when we understand the lengths that others went to before us. Those making Black people collateral damage in their victim-blaming schemes aren’t much better than the liberal resignation essentializing Blackness as meaning “we’ve done enough.” Black skin doesn’t mean we inherited activism or a radical resume. If you do the work, you are those things, but not just because you fit the description of an identity. Plenty of the people we’re fighting against right now represent the diversification of empire and fascism, since our adversaries are not only white men. "
June 3, 2025 at 7:07 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
From Aubrey Hirsch's "The Real Dangers Women Face" (Which are not at all the dangers Republicans "want" to "protect" us from)
Screenshot of an Aubrey Hirsch graphic: at the top, the text reads: "You're more likely to die doing any of these activities than you are having an abortion." Then, there are clockwise drawings of three women doing activities: 1) a woman wearing a purple scuba suit and a breathing tank with the text "Scuba Diving" next to her. 2) a brown woman in rock-climbing gear (a helmet, top, shorts, and harness) attached to a structure that she is climbing with "Rock Climbing" next to her. 3) A woman in a hat, top, and shorts, running, with "Running a Marathon" next to her. The text at the bottom reads: "But No One is trying to Criminalize Them."
May 21, 2025 at 3:01 PM
kidadaewilliams.com
Another delightful puzzle assembled: Faith Ringgold’s "Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles."
Picture of an assembled jigsaw puzzle: Faith Ringgold's "The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles." It features eight Black women change-makers standing together in a row: [Madam C.J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker. Ringgold added her fictional character, Willa Marie Simone, a fictional composite of her 16 year old self, in the lower left beside Walker] and one white man off to the side [Vincent Van Gogh, holding a vase with 15 roses] in a field of sunflowers with trees and the sky in the background. The 8 Black women hold the edge of the quilt with a sunflower pattern across it. The text around the border identifies the women by name and "Sunflower Quilters Society of America, March 22, 1922, an International Symbol of our Dedication to Change the World."
May 11, 2025 at 11:31 AM
kidadaewilliams.com
h/t ‪wanderer86.bsky.social‬ and michaelharriot.bsky.social
An image of a quote of handwritten text that reads: “But What Can I do, I am just one person” said 7 billion people. Followed by a heart.
April 15, 2025 at 12:17 PM