Claude 'Rick' Roberts, Jr 1941-2013

Was at the Houston hospice today when my father passed away at 12 noon CDT.

Didn't talk about it much on the blog, but my dad is a Black radio and Houston radio legend. 

He's also one of the reasons why I have the public speaking skills I do right now since everyone from my various schools to my home church had me standing at their podiums since I was age 6 MCing their programs.

Dad even had me doing a commercial promoting his morning drive time radio show when I was in second grade. 

Dad was a native Houstonian, and started his radio career at WBOK-AM in New Orleans.   He spent bulk of his radio career starting in 1967 in the Houston area at KYOK-AM as its program director and at KTSU-FM before he retired in 1993.

I had a ringside seat to much of the Houston Black radio world growing up.  KYOK had a ground breaking RV that served as a mobile broadcasting studio and I bounced around different areas of town to many of those remotes.  

There were also a few nights when he brought that vehicle to the house pre or post remote and I got to sleep in it.

I also got to see firsthand the major love and respect many people had for him inside and outside the community because he not only was a proud Black man who stood up for his beliefs and was willing to do more than just talk about them, he was a voice for the voiceless in H-town.  

And he was one heck of a play by play announcer  If ESPN had started a little earlier you probably would have heard him calling football and basketball games on that network.  As it was I did get to watch him call Texas Southern University and HISD football games from the Astrodome press box and see people like NFL Hall of Famers Walter Payton and Doug Williams play while happily sipping on my bottomless soda cup. .  

I was also constantly amazed by the people he knew on a first name basis inside and outside the Houston area in the radio, music and political arenas.  That's probably a major reason why I have the deep interest in politics and I do what I do as a human rights warrior. 

I'm comforted in the fact he didn't suffer when he passed away and his legacy in the industry will live long past the days when my family's tears have dried.

Many of his photos from his radio days are in the African American Archives of Music and Culture in their Black Radio collection housed at IU-Bloomington.  There have also been people writing tribute articles expressing how much he meant to them and their love for him..    

Speaking of love, thanks to all of you who have lifted my family and I up in prayer, kept us immersed in your positive thoughts, and have been there at various times when we needed it during this difficult period for us.  

My family still has heavy hearts and a difficult few days yet to navigate, but with your help we know we will. 

Well Dad, you're not suffering anymore.  Say hello to Grandmother Tama for me.


TransGriot Note:  First photo from the AAAMC archives is a 1974 one of Dad and Shaft's Richard Roundtree in KYOK's studio.  The second one is Dad, Michael Jackson (yep, the future King of Pop), Pluria Marshall, Jr and the teen TransGriot during a KYOK sponsored 'Meet The Jackson 5' event in August 1974.

       

Rest In Peace Rodney King

From Renee of Womanist Musings

The beating of Rodney King was an example of police brutality that rang throughout the African Diaspora.  Watching the video, we knew that all that separated us from King was a simple matter of time and place.  I remember seeing the video for the first time and believing that finally, cops would be held accountable for their actions in the Black community, only to be horrified when the not guilty verdict was delivered.

As a Canadian, I remember most the smug reporting of our media on this issue, as though Canada does not have its own history of police brutality against people of colour, or its own history of criminalizing driving while Black. There was a failure to understand why this event resonated so deeply with us and it was cast repeatedly as an American issue, rather than an issue of race, which evenly effects all of the descendants of the African Slave trade.

It was with a heavy heart that I learned King was found dead at the bottom of his pool on Sunday.

King was not the perfect victim we were reminded repeatedly, as though one only had to be good  to avoid his fate, as though Blackness in and of itself doesn't have a history of being marked.  To even go down this road, one would have to ignore the impact of living in a White supremacist state as a person of colour. He was reared in a world that told him repeatedly that he did not matter and the verdict itself proved this to be true.  No matter what King was guilty of, no one deserved to have their civil rights violated like this, yet the excuses kept coming.

As Los Angeles erupted in righteous rage, King begged for peace, asking famously, "can't we all just get along?"  The answer then, and the answer now is no.  There is no getting along with White supremacy because it preys on our lives, it preys on our children and it preys on our souls.  Police brutality continues to be a problem in our communities. Racist Stop and Frisk policies continue to disproportionately target Black and Latino communities, and yet we are told that this is a public good and that it's about safety.  Is the world really that much safer believing the lie that only POC commit crimes? What about the psychological effect of  knowing that your race is enough to make you a target?

Our clothing and our manner of presentation is at fault and threatening we are told and yet, even wearing a suit and leaving rehearsal, Giancarlo Esposito of Breaking Bad and Once Upon a Time was recently stopped and frisked at gunpoint.  What could he have done differently?  How should he have been less threatening?  He isn't even the only celebrity of colour to receive this treatment, just the latest. There is no rich enough, or good enough, to avoid being a target of racism.  When you have a cop bragging that he "fried another nigger,"  how exactly is this stop and frisk policy doing any good?  You'll all be relieved to learn that he isn't a racist though. This is why we can't just all get along.

There is some suspicion surrounding King's death and the statements of his girlfriend.  How and why he died is something that will be debated and questioned for some time to come I suspect.  At this moment however, what matters to me is the legacy that he left behind.  He inspired an entire generation to put behind its apathy and fight.  Many still view the riots as simple rampant lawlessness, rather than a result of a community in so much pain that it had no choice but to implode.  The beating of Rodney King revealed to the world the truth of what justice means when you are a person of colour and all of these years later, not a damn thing has been done to fix this situation.  Despite a Black president, and protests by Black civil rights leaders nothing has changed.

Rodney King was not a perfect man and such an expectation is not only unrealistic, it is victim blaming. His life has been dissected and twisted much in the same way that every single Black victim of White supremacy has experienced.  I don't seek now to re-envision him as a paragon of goodness because even that would be disrespectful.   If we remember one thing about King, we need to remember that he was human and respect all that this entails.  His humanity should have protected him, it should have made the brutality perpetrated against him unthinkable and but for the colour of his skin, it might very well have.  King deserved better than life gave him and I hope that in death, he finds the peace he was never able to achieve in life. For the rest of us, there can be no peace, as long as we understood to be sub human.

RIP Agnes Torres Hernandez

The international community of trans activists is one in which we are not only a close knit bunch, we tend to form friendships for life as we get to know each other.

When we're not busy e-mailing and chatting with each other trading strategy, tactics and information as to what has worked and what hasn't in our struggles in our various nations to advance trans human rights coverage, we'll quickly shit to what's happening in our personal lives or give each other the moral and emotional support we'll need to continue to do a job we all know can be a tough one.  

We are also painfully aware that in some nations, being an out, proud and open trans human rights activist takes tremendous courage because it can lead to being harassed by the powers that be you are fighting.  It can also be a death sentence as Cynthia Nicole Moreno's 2009 death in Honduras sadly pointed out.

Sadly, I won't get the pleasure to meet Agnes Torres Hernandez. 

Agnes Torres Hernandez was a 28 year old psychologist and educator fighting for the human rights of our trans brothers and sisters in Mexico.  She disappeared last Friday after leaving her home in Puebla to attend a party in the small town of Chipilo.   Her body was found with her throat slashed, burn marks on it and clothed only in her underwear, a blouse with suspenders and a brown jacket.

Hernandez was becoming an important TBLG human rights voice in Mexico for her trans brothers and sisters, and 2000 people gathered in Puebla's central town square to demand justice for her murder.   

It is the sixth crime aimed at members of the Mexican TBLG community that has yet to see even one of them solved and a perpetrator brought to justice. 

While her voice has sadly been stilled, the fight continues for trans human rights coverage around the world and her trans brothers and sisters in her homeland and elsewhere will not rest until it happens..

TransGriot Note:  Read this open letter from Bamby Salcedo the publisher of xQsi Magazine, which covers Latin@ trans issues.   It concerns her thoughts about the senseless murder of Agnes Torres.

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