Revisiting “The Color Curtain”

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

The Bandung Conference was held in April of 1955. It was a meeting of representatives from 29 nations that then contained 65 percent of the world’s population, which were peoples of color that had been colonized or interfered with by European powers.

This conference was commonly known as the Asian-African Conference. Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon organized it and then invited 25 more countries to send representatives and observers. The invited countries were (in alphabetical order here): Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana (then called “The Gold Coast”), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam, and Yemen.

After World War II ended, the only two military superpowers were the United States and the U.S.S.R. which competed with each other for influence in the Third World. The United States was initially invited to the conference but refused to send a representative. The USA denounced this conference. While these newly independent nations did not want to align with the Eastern bloc or the West, the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) did gain considerable influence in the region. Black Americans Richard Wright, and US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., however, did attend.

Black novelist Richard Wright recorded what he witnessed at this conference where Africans, Asians, Black Americans, East Indians, Indigenous Peoples and other peoples of color met in Bandung, Indonesia to figure out a way forward in the new post-colonial era. No European nations were invited.

The conference allowed newly independent nations to assert their sovereignty. European colonialism’s oppression and exploitation and interference in African and Asian countries engendered a need for these nations to meet so that they could successfully deal with each other.

The outcome of this conference was the Non-Aligned Movement which discouraged countries in attendance from aligning with First World and Second World nations. It also produced an agreement called “The Ten Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” which emphasized cooperation, respect for boundaries and sovereignty, non-interference in each country’s affairs, and resistance to any aggression from the Western World.

I encourage everyone to read author Richard Wright’s observations about Bandung and recognize that not only are all of these nations of color much more geopolitically complex than they were 70 years ago, they are also more heavily populated today with much younger populations than Europe.

Referred to now as The Global Community, people of color now make up roughly 85 percent of all the people on this earth. Felon 47 and his yes-people know what these numbers mean which is why they want to stave off the inevitable by attempting to occupy and place Canada and Greenland under the US umbrella. Yet, the United States is disadvantaged in numerous ways.

Even though the USA still has perhaps the most skilled military in the world, China has the largest military. The USA is now seen as a pariah by most of the world courtesy of the person sitting in the Oval Office and his inept Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who may soon be replaced. Even worse, most of the US population is unilingual whereas many individuals in The Global Community are multilingual. That does not bode well for this nation that is slowly becoming isolationist to the point where we could lose allies, or worse, we lose knowledge about what the rest of the world is planning.

It would be interesting if another Asian-African conference, such as the one held in 1955, were held today or sometime in the near future. I also wonder which nations would not be invited.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

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The 13th Amendment and El Salvador

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

The first time I taught a US History class, I had my students study the wording of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution and debate whether or not slavery had actually been abolished or had it simply been reconstructed:

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

By the time master filmmaker Ava DuVernay finished her documentary 13th, I was salivating with anticipation. She did not and never does disappoint. She traced the origins of that loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed for servitude to be imposed for crimes well into the 21st century.

Slavery had/has gone away in some form. Yet, one of my favorite Black judges, the late New York Supreme Court Judge Bruce M. Wright noted the awful way Black and Brown defendants were treated. Wright earned the nickname “Turn ‘Em Loose Bruce” because he had witnessed one too many Black men and women end up in court because they stole something trying to feed their families only to be sentenced to anywhere from 10 to 20 years in prison. So, Wright gave them some minimal punishment, but he often turned them loose.

I remember his description of a case where a Black man had an extremely sick wife. Neither he nor his wife could afford her medicine. So, in desperation, the man stole a television set from the hotel where he worked. He pawned the television to purchase his wife’s medications. This man had never committed a crime before in his life, but he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Now here’s the next rub. For people old enough to remember, the only thing we knew for sure about prisoners when we were growing up was that prisoners pressed license plates. Well, folks that isn’t true anymore. Now American prisoners make…Clothing, Computers, Electronics, Furniture, and all that discounted stuff you find at Walmart and Target. US prisons generate anywhere from 2 to 5 billion a year in profit while prisoners who do the work never earn the standard minimum wage.

So, as you rightly fight for and ponder the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an American citizen who sits unlawfully in a jail in El Salvador, think about Felon 47 and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele giving each other a high-five and talking about not returning individuals who are wrongfully detained while they also discuss building more prisons in El Salvador. I’m going to leave it right there.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

Normalizing Evil

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.

I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.

Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.

Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.

Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been.

People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb. Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled.

Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

To End Crucifixion

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

The first time I heard of crucifixion outside of a biblical context I was watching the film Spartacus, released in 1960 that starred Kirk Douglas. I was in high school in the 1970s when I first saw the film on television.

Crucifixion was one of the most excruciating and barbaric of all forms of execution. The person on the cross, slowly and agonizingly, died from suffocation as their rib cage was forced upwards. They could not fully breathe and eventually they died.

No moment in the film Spartacus brought me more tears than the fight scene when the slaves “Spartacus” (Douglas) and “Antoninus” (played by Tony Curtis) were forced by Roman authorities to fight each other to the death.

Spartacus and Antoninus, who loved each other like brothers, were determined to kill one another in order to spare the other the agony of crucifixion. Spartacus eventually kills Antoninus. In grief, Spartacus yells at his tormentors, “He’ll come back. He’ll come back; and he’ll be millions.”

That scene gave me the sense that when the best people die, they will somehow be reincarnated and other people of goodwill will join them. That belief, however, has never brought me much comfort.

MAGA supporters are not likely to understand my interpretation of the themes in the film Spartacus. They follow orders, not facts. They don’t think of people on the Left, or people of peace as anything other than unrealistic and subhuman. They don’t think compromise with people with whom they disagree is anything other than a show of weakness.

MAGA adherents of all races and ethnicities believe in White male supremacy in a world that gets browner by the day. While U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers round up every undocumented brown worker they can find, Felon 47 wants to annex countries inhabited primarily by people classifiable as white.

White male supremacy only functions when people believe in the stereotype of the “Great White Father” who is considered the only one fit to lead and to appoint others to important positions. This is part of the reason why a lot of voters voted against their own interests and against their own people.

Felon 47 supporters always claim to be Christians. I do not entirely trust the Christianity formulated in the Western World because the people who formulated it cannot even so much as admit that there is virtually no such thing as a person classifiable as “white” that was/is native to any location in the Middle East or North and Eastern Africa.

A sandy blond-haired, white-complexioned, blue-eyed Yeshu’a has always been a lie. So, when you engage with MAGA supporters (and many anti-MAGA folks) you are engaging with people where generations of their families have prescribed to the lie for centuries. Felon 47 stepped into a centuries old illusion, proclaimed himself to be sent by God, then went around autographing Bibles.

I can count on one hand the Christian ministers I respect; most of them are women. They inspire. They pray. They analyze. They talk about justice. They talk to you like you have a brain; and they do so without the big egos and the expectance of deference I have encountered from a few too many clergymen.

At the end of all discussions and analyses, Yeshu’a’s life still ends the same way. No matter how good he was, he was still executed by crucifixion which was the Roman Empire’s method of execution for paupers and other petty criminals.

No matter how popular an itinerant preacher Yeshu’a was, church fathers and the Roman government considered him a threat to their power; and they used every lie, every smear campaign against him until many of his own followers turned against him and called for him to be put to death.

I do wonder when we, particularly those of us in the Western World, will get sick of that perpetual narrative where someone has to die in order to free us?

Must the good man or the good woman always be the sacrifice? Or, have we absorbed a skewed Western Christian Worldview for so long that we cannot even imagine any form of salvation, deliverance or peace without someone being killed?

Is some form of crucifixion inevitable or merely a twisted human habit where we refuse to think our way out and fight our way out of problems we cannot completely face so that we require a martyr to prove we were, at least, thinking in the right manner? That kind of thinking should not ease our consciences.

Maybe I’m a fool, but I still think that if we learned anything—even from an edited and modified form of Christianity—it ought to be that goodness and mercy and fair play may get someone jailed or killed, but it should not have to be that way.

Church services are often filled with sermons that make Yeshu’a seem more like a spirit than a flesh and blood man who once walked the earth. And if it is true that he died for our sins, exactly when do we accept that the point of his crucifixion was for us to do more than just acknowledge the awful habits of human history where we persecute or allow good men and women to continue to be persecuted?

Felon 47 and his underlings corrupt every precedent set by Yeshu’a. They resemble the Roman government and its sycophants while they embrace the Nihilistic principles of a 19th century Russian Party that used terrorism and assassination as part of their reform.

MAGA supporters and Felon 47 let people be detained or die in order to stave off the inevitability of the collapse of the White Western World. But will we, who know Felon 47 is wrong, fight to stop the deaths, persecutions, and detentions of people who only want to work and feed their families?

Will we ever admit that the story of Yeshu’a’s crucifixion means that we are charged with ending the blood-letting, the needless assaults, the threats? Will we ever be brave enough to end needless persecutions; or will we watch these modern-day crucifixions as if we were watching the fight between Spartacus and Antoninus thinking that it is only a movie. So, no one actually died.

Tony Curtis (left) ; Kirk Douglas (right) in the film SPARTICUS, 1960. Alamy Stock Photo

Pawns and Queens: Analogies For a New Era

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

We historians often find data in some file in an obscure archive, in letters written by someone’s grandmother, in photos, newspaper clippings, legal records. Our discipline demands that we dig, analyze, rethink and revise, constantly. I liken our work to studying the function of each piece in a Chess game. We get different perspectives about the same set of circumstances depending on which Chess piece we examine.

I was a mediocre Chess player. I had a few friends who played like champions. So, I often just watched them play. I remain, however, fascinated by the game’s objectives and, specifically, the roles of Pawns and Queens.

Pawns are the most numerous pieces in Chess; they are the foot soldiers. Each player has eight Pawns. A Pawn can move one or two squares forward if that move is its first move. After the first move, a Pawn can only move one square forward unless the square is blocked by some other piece. A Pawn can capture or attack another piece, however, by moving diagonally to the left or right.

The Pawn is the only piece in a Chess game that can change ranks. Depending on the skill of a Chess player, a Pawn can become a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen. In spite of a Pawn’s ability to advance to a higher rank, it is still considered the lowest ranking piece in the game. It is only worth one point.

The objective of the game is to capture your opponent’s King where that King has no way out, which means Checkmate. While the King is considered the most important piece in the game, it is the Queen that is considered the most powerful piece.

Queens are the only pieces that can move across the board in any manner as long as they are not successfully blocked by other pieces. If you lose, it is highly likely that you lost because your opponent’s Queen checkmated your King. Chess players feel much more confident when they have successfully captured or blocked her.

You can still win the game without capturing the Queen, but you have to be extremely strategic and precise to do so. You can also win without making good moves with your Pawns, but it is highly unlikely.

Chess is now over 1,500 years old. While there is some skepticism about its precise origins, many Chess historians believe that the Indian board game called “Chaturanga” was the earliest predecessor of Chess. There were many other versions that followed, but are too numerous to mention here.

In early versions of Chess, there was a piece called “Vizier” or “Advisor” for centuries. In the 1500s, in the era of great and powerful Queens in Europe, like Spain’s Isabella and England’s Elizabeth, “Viziers” or “Advisors” were redesigned and renamed “Queens.” You can learn an awful lot of world history just by examining Chess.

So here’s the deal: There is no such thing as a Chess game where Queens/Women Heads of State/Women in general are not powerful and flexible while the Kings/Men Heads of State/Men in general are highly important but who have or exercise fewer tactical moves.

There is also no such thing as a Chess game where Pawns/Foot Soldiers/Laborers are not essential to success, even while they are considered less important.

Apply any and all of the above to what you see happening in the United States and the world right now. I refuse to tell you how to analyze and interpret this history because there are so many interpretations and analogies that can be extrapolated from this board game.

All I will say is that nothing is going to change or be corrected without the skill of devoted Pawns, and the power and daring of Queens.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: International Law