Young, Gifted and Black: Black music icon Aretha Franklin besought ‘Jesus, Be a Fence Around’ that was answered with ‘Amazing Grace’ as a ‘natural resource’
Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, at the family home on 406 Lucy Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist circuit preacher from Shelby, Mississippi, and her mother was a pianist and gospel singer whom Mahalia Jackson once called one of the finest in the country.
How fallen reggae legend Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley became political, ideological threats to US resulting in CIA assassinating Marley
Then came 1980s when the foundations of the Berlin Wall looked shaken and East and West Germany looked to be healing longstanding ideological rifts. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), then led by Mikhail Gorbachev, began tumbling like a house of cards. The disintegration of USSR for some time appeared like the ultimate dissipation of communism. There would be no more threat to US cultural, military and ideological hegemony.
