Bomani Armah | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Darel Hancock |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Maryland, College Park |
| Genre | Poetry |
Bomani Armah (previously known as Darel Hancock), also known as D'mite, or Not a Rapper, is an American vocalist best known for the 2007 single "Read a Book."
Armah grew up in Mitchellville, Maryland. He dropped out of the University of Maryland, College Park to become a musician. He is divorced and is the father of twins. [1] He is also a member of Iota Phi Theta fraternity.
In 2005, Bomani was introduced to the world with the debut of the Mello-D and the Rados music video "Cool Witchu" on BET. By October 2006, The Washington Post regarded him as "one of the more entertaining voices in a local spoken word scene that's overflowing with talent." They also noted that he was "grabb[ing] hearts and minds" with "Read a Book", a spoof of crunk songs that was "scary because it's a bit difficult to tell that it's satire". [2]
In January 2007, Armah took part in Martin Luther King Day observances at the Washington National Cathedral, with Sister Helen Prejean and the Urban Nation H.I.P.-H.O.P. Choir. [3] [4]
Armah became famous with the MySpace-released 2007 single "Read A Book." The song admonishes listeners to "read a muh'fuckin book", "raise yo kids", wear deodorant, buy some land, and brush their "God damned teeth", among other things, including advising "your body needs water, so drink that shit", in a satire of crunk-style songs which advocate a more "gangsta" lifestyle, set to a loop of an excerpt from Beethoven's Symphony No.5. A clean version also exists, where the profanity is edited out. Success of the single grew when it was used as the topic of a short animated film which aired on Black Entertainment Television's The 5ive . Animated by Six Point Harness Studios, the video features stylized cartoon stereotypes who are directed (often by force) to carry out the advice presented in the lyrics of "Read a Book" by a crunk rapper. [5] In June 2007 the song was included on Dan Greenpeace and DJ Yoda's Unthugged Vol. 2 with an introduction from Armah introducing himself as D'Mite.
In the fall of 2007, Armah released a song about the Jena Six case in Louisiana. He also performed at the CMJ Music Marathon, where a Village Voice blogger panned him as a "technically strong rapper with zero stage presence and only slightly more personality." [6]
Armah returned to the National Cathedral in January 2008, to lead its Martin Luther King Day event. [7]
In March 2008, The Washington Post published his commentary calling on Barack Obama to show his "white side." [8] [9]
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee", also known as simply "America", is an American patriotic song, the lyrics of which were written by Samuel Francis Smith. The song served as one of the de facto national anthems of the United States before the adoption of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the official U.S. national anthem in 1931. The melody used is the same as that of the national anthem of the United Kingdom, "God Save the King".
Crunk is a subgenre of hip hop music that emerged in the early 1990s and gained mainstream success during the mid 2000s. Crunk is often up-tempo and one of Southern hip hop's more dance and club oriented subgenres. An archetypal crunk track frequently uses a main groove consisting of layered keyboard synths, a drum machine clapping rhythm, heavy basslines, and shouting vocals, often in a call and response manner. The term "crunk" was also used throughout the 2000s as a blanket term to denote any style of Southern hip hop, a side effect of the genre's breakthrough to the mainstream. The word derives from its African-American Vernacular English past-participle form, "crunk", of the verb "to crank". It refers to being excited or high on drugs.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president of the United States. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and worked as a civil rights lawyer before holding public office.
Joseph Echols Lowery was an American minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the civil rights movement. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. and others, serving as its vice president, later chairman of the board, and from 1977 to 1997 its president. Lowery participated in most of the major activities of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued his civil rights work into the 21st century. He was called the "Dean of the Civil Rights Movement."
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate.
Jordan Carlos is an American stand-up comedian who played a recurring character on The Colbert Report and is a co-host on the Nickelodeon kids' show Me TV. He also appeared as a panelist and reporter on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
Jeremiah Alvesta Wright Jr. is a pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he led for 36 years, during which its membership grew to over 8,000 parishioners. Following retirement, his beliefs and preaching were scrutinized when segments of his sermons about terrorist attacks on the United States and government dishonesty were publicized in connection with the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama.
Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She is the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. Dunham was known as Stanley Ann Dunham through high school, then as Ann Dunham, Ann Obama, Ann Soetoro, a.k.a. Ann Sutoro, and resumed her maiden name, Ann Dunham, later in life.
David Jeffries Garrow is an American author and historian. He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality (1994), a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017), and other works.
Lord T & Eloise are a crunk rap group from Memphis, Tennessee. Lord T dresses as an 18th-century aristocrat, while Eloise wears a tuxedo and sported a "24-karat" gold skin. The self-proclaimed "intergalactic time travelers" and "horsemen of the Rapocalypse" said they were on a mission to save rap music.
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. Previously she was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation. She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality is a bestselling book by Jerome Corsi opposing Barack Obama's candidacy for President of the United States. The book alleges Obama's "extreme leftism", "extensive connections with Islam and radical politics", "naïve... foreign policy", past drug use and connections to corrupt backers, among other things. The book has been criticized for containing factual errors, for being racially charged, and for being a political "attack book" containing smears, falsehoods, and innuendo.
"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was one of the most famous moments of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.
Following his victory in the 2008 United States presidential election, then-President-elect Barack Obama gave his victory speech at Grant Park in his home city of Chicago, on November 4, 2008, before an estimated crowd of 240,000. Viewed on television and the Internet by millions of people around the globe, Obama's speech focused on the major issues facing the United States and the world, all echoed through his campaign slogan of change. He also mentioned his maternal grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who had died just two nights earlier.
Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Senator Barack Obama was one of the most widely covered and studied developments of the 2008 presidential campaign, as she has been described as the most influential woman in the world. Winfrey first endorsed Senator Obama in September 2006 before he had even declared himself a candidate. In May 2007 Winfrey made her official endorsement of candidate Obama, and in December 2007, she made her first campaign appearances for him. Two economists estimate that Winfrey's endorsement was worth over a million votes in the Democratic primary race and that without it, Obama would have received fewer votes. Then-Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich claimed that the endorsement was so significant in making Obama president-elect that he considered offering Obama's former seat in the Senate to Winfrey.
Iman Crosson, better known by his stage name Alphacat, is an American actor, impressionist, and YouTube personality known for his impersonations of former U.S. President Barack Obama and his starring role in independent film Along the Roadside.
Jerome Robert Corsi is an American conspiracy theorist and author. His two New York Times best-selling books, Unfit for Command (2004) and The Obama Nation (2008), attacked Democratic presidential candidates and have been criticized by opposition.
Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters is a 2010 children's book by Barack Obama, with illustrations by Loren Long. It is described by the publisher as a "tribute to thirteen groundbreaking Americans and the ideals that have shaped our nation." The stories of thirteen Americans are told in the book: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong, Sitting Bull, Cesar Chavez, Billie Holiday, Maya Lin, Albert Einstein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Jane Addams."
Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President is a book by Jerome Corsi which promotes the false claim that then U.S. president Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the United States and was thus constitutionally unqualified to hold the office. The book was released on May 17, 2011, and reached No. 6 on the New York Times list of best-selling hardcover non-fiction books. It has been publicized in politically conservative venues.
The Double Conscious: Race & Rhetoric is a 2011 educational documentary compilation of speeches, by a number of prominent figures, dealing with race and racism in America.