“Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge on Aug. 6, 1930, in Chicago, the 10th of 12 children… She started as ‘a sexy young thing in a Marilyn Monroe dress’ before joining Max Roach on ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,’ a landmark musical statement of the civil rights movement.Abbey Lincoln, an acclaimed jazz singer, songwriter and actress who evolved from a supper-club singer into a strong voice for civil rights, has died. She was 80. Lincoln died Saturday in a nursing home in New York, said Evelyn Mason, her niece. No cause was given, but she had been in failing health…..There was a passion to what she did,” said jazz critic Don Heckman, who noted that Lincoln’s songwriting made her a rarity among jazz singers. “She was not someone who was just singing a song. She had an agenda, and a lot of it had to do with civil rights…. She expressed herself in dramatic and impressive fashion in what she said and how she sang…” READ MORE

“We are the women who were kidnapped and brought to this continent as slaves. We are the women who were raped, are still being raped, and our bastard children snatched from our breasts and scattered to the winds to be lynched, castrated, de-egoed, robbed, burned, and deceived.We are the women whose strong and beautiful Black bodies were—and are—still being used as a cheap labor force for Miss Anne’s kitchen and Mr. Charlie’s bed, whose rich, black, and warm milk nurtured—and still nurtures—the heir to the racist and evil slavemaster.We are the women who dwell in the hell-hole ghettos all over the land. We are the women whose bodies are sacrificed, as living cadavers, to experimental surgery in the white man’s hospitals for the sake of white medicine. We are the women who are invisible on the television and movie screens, on the Broadway stage. We are the women who are lusted after, sneered at, leered at, hissed at, yelled at, grabbed at, tracked down by white degenerates in our own pitiable, poverty-stricken, and prideless neighborhoods…We are the women whose hair is compulsively fried, whose skin is bleached, whose nose is “too big,” whose mouth is “too big and loud,” whose behind is “too big and broad,” whose feet are “too big and flat,” whose face is “too black and shiny,” and whose suffering and patience is too long and enduring to be believed…Who’re just too damned much for everybody…” READ MORE

To all of our Champion Pan-Africanists who were & are the bridge over the troubled waters of the Atlantic, We Celeberate You & Vow to Keep the Spirits Alive! REST IN POWER QUEEN ABBEY LINCOLN!

The beat has a rich & magnificent history full of adventure excitement & mystery some of it bitter & some of it sweet but all of it part of the beat…the beat..the beat…they say it began with a chant & a hum & a black hand laid on a native drum……Bantu, Zulu, Watusi, Ashanti……

FREEDOM DAY!