‘Something I Said’ Archives
Three Days of Respite at Chicago and Lake
Something I Said Three Days of Respite at Chicago and Lake By DWIGHT HOBBES Minnesota’s third annual Black Entrepreneur State Fair thankfully accomplished what the Minneapolis Police Department increasingly fails to do, safeguard the public from rampant drug dealing along with related violence and prostitution. To be sure, there’s no telling whether this was the aim. It may have simply been that the South Minneapolis locale, Chicago Ave and Lake Street, is about the most heavily trafficked intersection in town. Easily accessible by both mass transit and a main drag that amounts to a super highway with connecting streets instead of off rampants. A perfect place for the upwards of 50 vendors to make a killing, especially in this dead economy nobody wants to come right out and call another depression. For the sake of argument let’s say it killed the proverbial two birds with one stone. For three days, the Chicago-Lake hub was fenced off to buses, pedestrians and a [...]
Something I Said: Mario and Melvin
By DWIGHT HOBBES The original title of Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss! (Sony Pictures, 2003) was How To Get The Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass, entirely fitting for the social commentary his father Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Yeah, Inc., 1971) put forth in a time when grassroot black America had grown sick and tired of this country kicking us around to keep us down. Indeed, Baadasssss! is a dramatized, making of historic document, looking at what went into Melvin returning the favor and putting his foot in American cinema’s behind, profoundly challenging its cherished tenet of supremacist propaganda. There is a reason, after all, The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense lauded it, in Huey Newton's words as "the first truly revolutionary…" that, in the opening credits, starred "The Black Community," It became required viewing for Party members. There is the same reason Bill Cosby, who’d narrated CBS’ Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed [...]
Society of St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop
Something I Said By DWIGHT HOBBES Society of St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop is, in very good terms as the euphemistic parlance goes, a beast: the South Minneapolis operation has made it through the corona contagion thus far, the catastrophic 2020 riot and the ongoing economic climate which, stimulus or no stimulus, is in lousy shape. That rioting, supposedly in the name of George Floyd, absolutely devastated the very community it's alleged to have been for the sake of. Overnight - actually the course of a few days - the business outlets along Lake Street that it didn't shut down were flatout destroyed, depriving whole neighborhoods of affordable goods and services in an area where affordable goods and services amount to a godsend. Not to mention store staff glad to have a job with all the contagion-related layoffs and firings suddenly were left wondering how to pay their bills. Fortunately, more than a year later, much, in fact most, of Lake Street's thriving commerce has [...]
