BAVUAL The African Heritage Magazine Winter 2025 Issue by BIRKETT COMMUNICATIONS, INC.

ROLE MODELS ISSUE

THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

BAVUAL ®

CRYPTO FEVER! SEE PAGE 74

INSIDE YASUKE

THE BLACK SAMURAI

WHY WHITE PEOPLE NEED TO LEARN BLACK HISTORY

THE IRONY OF

F.A.F.O.

THE REAL SUPER HEROES! HOW BLACK PEOPLE HAVE INFLUENCED EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

WINTER 2025

10.00

IN THIS ISSUE

12 22 14 12

My Take

Should we fear the “final” journey?

The Drift

The rapid rise of F.A.F.O.

True Grit Texas Congressman Jasmine Crockett, the Democrats’ fiery rising star

Famous Winters February 28, 1984: “Thriller” Michael Jackson wins seven Grammy Awards and becomes the King of Pop

The Times Election 2024 Post-Mortem: white women and latin men vote against their own best interest; racism and misogyny are “in” again; Diddy gets busted by “Five-0”; Republicans back reparations - for white men; the first black American Catholic saint?

The Culture Gentry and Ghetto: black economic and class divisions explode; BAVUAL Recommends two classic blaxploitation films, circa 1970s

Destinations Modern Africans who are coming to America - this time voluntarily; a photo tour inside Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History

BAVUAL WINTER 2025 | 3

IN THIS ISSUE

38 66 34

74 86 Saint Bavual’s Return Congressman Bavual Adisa and other progressive rebels battle the Dark GOP Empire for the future

COVER: The Real Super Heroes! The African people have influenced everything imaginable

Educate Yourself The story of Yasuke, the black samurai; 16 facts that will make you re-think what you know about black history

The Hustle

Jocks

Bitcoin: is it the Fool’s Gold of the early 21st century?; Maggie Walker, black woman banker during Jim Crow

Harlem Globetrotters, basketball’s clown princes

Roll of Honor

8 honored men and women, lions and lionesses in winter

Benediction Why white people need to learn black history

4 | BAVUAL WINTER 2025

THIRD ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

BAVUAL

THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

Bavual Vol. 4 Issue 1 Winter 2025

Editorial Earl A. Birkett Editor Stephen G. Hall, PhD Special Editor Associate Editor Kristen Jones

BAVUAL ADISA OUR MUSE

Design & Illustrations Debasish Sarma Editorial Advisor Myeshia C. Babers, PhD Marketing Multitrends International earl.a.birkett@gmail.com

BAVUAL: Swahili for "power, strength, force" ADISA: Yoruba for "one who is clear"

Advertising Multitrends International earl.a.birkett@gmail.com (201) 360-1139 Subscriptions Available in the U.S. only, at BAVUAL.COM Single copies are available outside the U.S. Contact Earl A. Birkett at eab@bavual.com Write to: Bavual, 42 Broadway, Suite 12-278,New York, NY 10004 Phone: (212) 419-5831 Email: eab@bavual.com

Available at: THE COVER: Black male and female super heroes designed using Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) program

Contents copyright

2025 Birkett Communications, Inc.

BAVUAL WINTER 2025 | 5

WE’RE HIRING

STUDENTS: INTERN FOR BAVUAL MAGAZINE EARN CREDITS TOWARD GRADUATION AND VALUABLE EXPERIENCE POSITIONS AVAILABLE IN EDITING AND WRITING SUBSCRIPTION AND ADVERTISING SALES (COMMISSION ONLY) CONTACT EARL A. BIRKETT 212-419-5731 eab@bavual.com Equal Opportunity Employer

My Take Should We Fear

The “Final” Journey? “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” Japanese writer Harold Murakami They call it many things, among them: Deceased, Expired, Passing Away, Eternal Rest, The Big Sleep, Dirt Nap and the latest one, Deleted. Whatever you call Death, it’s meaning is inescapable: your life in physical form is at an end in this world. You are no more. However, it doesn’t end there, not in this world, nor conceivably in the next. Unlike most living things, we are sentient human beings, fully aware that we exist. With that comes all of the traits of life, good and bad. Love, hate, generosity, greed, passivity, violence, courage, cowardice and, in the case of Death, fear. We are afraid of what we don’t know and cannot know because there is a another dimension where our soul, that amorphous thing which makes us who we are, goes when it leaves the body, and no one alive has ever crossed it and returned to tell us. Yes, I know there are those who will tell you that they did just that, and I will get to them in a sec. The two prevailing theories is that there is life after Death, called eternity, or there is nothing at all, just non-existence. If you are one who believes that we just blink in and blink out of existence as sort of a cosmic accident, you need not fear Death beyond perhaps its prospective physical pain. One the other hand, if you believe that Death is merely a gateway to yet another plane of existence, there is reason to be concerned, even fearful - at first. By the way, I will not promote one point of view or the other on a particular religious sect or philosophy in this writing.

Like most people, you learn to cope with life by adopting a set of beliefs, whether they are rational or insane. They give us meaning to what seems haphazard and without any purpose whatsoever. We think these beliefs come from our conscience, an inexplicable control valve within our soul that somehow tells us right from wrong. It’s where our basic sense of morality comes from. It’s innate, but it can be manipulated by our various traits as well as outside influencers. The conditions of our birth, our parents and family, our level of intelligence and sources of information, our economic and social status, our teachers, spouses, friends and strangers and especially our leaders in religion and politics. Our fears come from these influences and they determine how we will survive in this world and what we hope to experience in the next. The basis of the fear is “will we experience great joy or great suffering in this “afterlife”? Most major religions more or less adhere to the basic concept of a Heaven, where your soul (and often your “new” body) continues on in eternal bliss, or a Hell, where your soul suffers in eternal physical and emotional pain. Whether you believe in the Supreme Being or Savior of choice and/or were a good or evil person in this life will determine which place you wind up inhabiting. What do I believe? Well, I do believe in an afterlife, mainly do to a scarce feeling that it exists, but I have mixed feelings on how one gets to Paradise or Damnation. Part of me says you only have to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, while the other part believes that eternal peace is earned by the good works that you do. Obviously I will see if I’m right someday.

BAVUAL WINTER 2025 | 7

You can sign up to be a donor at organdonor.gov

The Drift

AFTER THE ELECTION COMES...

THE EPIPHANY OF F.A.F.O. It’s as clear cut and inescapable as 2+2=4. The consequences you suffer - or not - are the direct result of prior actions that you choose take and/or decisions that you make of your own free will. In others words: Fuck Around and Find Out.

When applied to the 77,303,428* souls who cast their vote for Donald John Trump, the 78-year-old defeated 45th president, convicted felon and civilly liable sex abuser (we can’t use the “r” word because we might get sued) and business fraud, over second-place finisher Kamala Harris to gain yet another - and hopefully final - term as the 47th president (putting Trump in a rarefied league with Grover Cleveland, the only other man elected to two non-consecutive terms), the ink on their ballot wasn’t dry before the buyer’s remorse started rolling in. Right after the November 5th election winner was declared early the next day, two search questions overwhelmed Google: 1) “what is a tariff?” and 2) “Can I change my vote”? Aside from the second question being painfully naive, stupid and frustrating to the 50.2% majority that voted against the prevailing minority candidate, both questions reveal the lack of education in civics that plague many citizens in the mid-2020s. The sizable Make America Great Again (MAGA) glassy-eyed cult that will take as gospel anything that Dear Leader says, that are a lost cause does not explain the greater number of voters who aren’t necessarily taken in by Trump’s hypnotic bullshit and gross bigotry but were convinced by Republican propaganda - and lack of a clear message and defense of a largely impressive economic record from Democrats - that economic and cultural conditions are so dire (they’re not) that they just rolled the dice for change. Problem is they gave power back to the guy who put them behind the eight ball in the first place during his first term. Sadly, those who Fooled Around and voted for Trump - white women facing the possibility of a national abortion ban without exceptions and a repeal of no-fault divorce, undocumented (and legal) latino immigrants who may be deported or rounded up in World War II-style detention camps, black males shut out of DEI programs and staring at more discrimination and police brutality, the middle-class and the working poor finding out that their wallets, already light with money because they can’t keep up with high prices and static wages, will get significantly lighter - are in the Find Out Phase. Adding salt to the wound is the prospect that they may not have even voted for Trump, but rather for Elon Musk, a South African plutocrat who appears to be as cruel as he is a megalomaniac. His goals are diametrically opposed to that of MAGA and most Americans. It’s not that comforting to visit these Trumpers on YouTube as they whine pathetically about how family and friends have disinvited them from Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year affairs and in general have disowned them going forward and even spouses have divorced them and employers have fired them. These woes are not entirely fair as society has remained intact over past political differences even more intense than the return of Trump - McCarthyism and the turmoil of the 1960s comes to mind - but one would have to even further back to witness the current polarization of America’s political, economic and social order. Worse, some people see it as irreversible. No one is comforted by or celebrating that. *as of early January 2005

BAVUAL WINTER 2025 | 9

True Grit

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett Is She The Democrats’ Answer to MAGA?

10 | BAVUAL WINTER 2025

By Stephen G. Hall PhD “Bad Built Bleach Blond Butch Body.” While not exactly on the level of “I have a dream” or other great orations from history, those stinging six words uttered by freshman Democratic congressperson Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a black woman, completely deflated her Republican colleague Margaret Taylor Greene, loopy water carrier for Donald Trump’s mammoth MAGA/QAnon political and cultural cult. At that moment, Crockett demonstrated the way to successfully attack Republican bullies while simultaneously making herself a force to be reckoned with in the U.S. House of Representatives, newly controlled by a narrow GOP majority after the 2022 midterm election. Unlike former First Lady Michelle Obama, who famously admonished, “when they [Republicans] go low we go high,” Crockett’s rallying cry appears to be “when they go low we hit them where it really hurts.” Crockett delivered her famous diss of Greene, who started the verbal fracas with her own nasty put-down of Crockett, while both House members - who had been assigned to the House Oversight Committee -sat during a routine hearing of the committee held on May 16, 2024. The committee was to decide on whether to hold Merrick Garland, the sitting attorney general in the Biden Administration, in contempt of Congress. (Garland eventually was held in contempt by a partisan Republican majority on June 12 or refusing to turn over audio related to President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.) Greene had just begun her second term representing Georgia’s 14th congressional district, which has been gerrymandered to favor the election of a Republican. She quickly gained a reputation in the House for espousing white supremist-based conspiracy theories so extreme that the entire House, in a bipartisan act, voted to remove Greene from all committee roles in response to her endorsements of political violence on February 4, 2021 - barely a month after she began her maiden term. (The Republicans returned her to committees after their victory in 2022.) The verbal altercation started when the 50-yearold Greene, who was responding to a barb from Crockett, said, "I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you're reading." Committee chairman James Comer ruled that her remark did not violate House protocol. To clarify the limits on personal comments, Crockett asked "If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?" Comer responded with "... a what, now?"

As Greene reeled in humiliation and Republicans were aghast at Crockett’s brashness, the exchange quickly went viral across social media, with many relishing in the entertainment value of seeing the two lawmakers in a verbal spat, almost more akin to something usually seen on reality television - but with Crockett clearly coming out on top. Her feisty, quickwitted verbal jiu-jitsu made her an instant internet star and a Democrat to be reckoned with on Republican-dominated Capitol Hill. Jasmine Felicia Crockett appears to have the smarts to back up the sass. She was born March 29, 1981, in St. Louis, Missouri. and graduated from Rhodes College in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts in business administration. As an undergraduate, Crockett decided to attend law school due to experiencing a series of hate crimes while attending college and subsequently being represented by the Cochran Law Firm.

When Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson announced her retirement in November 2021, Crockett announced her candidacy in the Democratic primary to replace her in the 30th congressional district. Johnson simultaneously announced that she was backing Crockett. In a controversial development, Crockett received extensive financial support from Super PACs aligned with the cryptocurrency industry. One donor from the industry, Sam Bankman-Fried, gave her campaign $1 million from his Protect Our Future PAC . In November 2023 Bankman-Fried was convicted of all seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering related to trading cryptocurrency. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. In the primary runoff election, Crockett defeated Jane Hope Hamilton. Crockett then won the general election to the 118th Congress in November. She was re-elected in November 2024.

Crockett earned her J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center in 2006 . She was a public defender for Bowie County, before formed a law firm, which was notable for taking pro bono cases for Black Lives Matter activists.

Although Crockett is a member of the Congressional Caucus, she has cast votes that are not popular with progressives. such as her vote to provide military aid to Israel in its war with Hamas following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Crockett cut her teeth in politics in 2020 by narrowly defeating incumbent Lorraine Birabi in the Democratic primary for state representative from Texas’ 100th district. She won unopposed in the November election.

Thus far, Crockett’s main accomplishment is her willingness to take the progressive fight to rightwing Republicans by giving as good as she gets, a lesson that she undoubtedly hopes her fellow Democrats will duplicate.

CROCKETT’S B6 IS NOW A CLASSIC INTERNET MEME

BAVUAL WINTER 2025 | 11