Make a Simple Paper Hat

A proposal at Omidyar Network for grants that I was following did not get chosen. The proposal is about the #2 killer world wide and that's water-borne diarrheal illnesses, mostly kids die but millions upon millions suffer. This problem is not so hard to solve. Anyway the proposal was good enough that matching funds will be provided for donation in December. I don't have money. So my efforts are trying to spread the meme of making paper party hats for fund raising. I made a blog hatsforhealth.blogspot.com/

These hats are simple to make and people often have paper out around the holidays anyway. I'd love for people to help by making hats to donate to the proposal at Omidyar. But making hats can be a project for raising money for anything. The more people are making hats the more the idea will spread. There's a Flickr pool to post pictures of the hats www.flickr.com/groups/21381949@N00/

One of the great advantages is that the materials to make these hats don't cost too much and they are simple enough for kids to make. So it's a holiday activity for kids trying to raise money for charitable gifts. The hats can be "sold" in anticipation of New Year's parties and other holiday gatherings.

Don't be mad at me. But any suggestions or links to the blog to help spread the idea would be appreciated.

Birmingham News

The Birmingham News sent reporters to cover Civil Rights news in their fair city, but did not publish the photos. Left forgotton they were discovered and the paper published 30 of them along with a story based on interviews with the photographers and some of the subjects still alive. www.al.com/unseen/ Newsworthy indeed.

Songs Are Sneaky Things

The folk singer Pete Seeger observed:

"Songs won't save the planet, but then neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders."

Yesterday I was moved to read Vincent Harding talk about music in the freedom movement www.pbs.org/wnet/religio...harding.html. I thought about writing about Fanny Lou Hamer www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html because while best known as the co-founder of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and speaking before a televised session of the credentials committee at the 1964 Democrat Covention; she was also known for her enthusiastic use of singing.

Harding can't imagine a freedom movement without songs; that songs are sneaky is a reason for that. But perhaps protest doesn't capture just how slippery songs are, slipping across so many borders of our lives. A post about Fanny Lou Hamer is certainly a good idea, but songs provide such a broad topic. Huddie William Ledbetter, Leadbelly en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly makes the context of songs in the struggle wider and so perhaps makes the story of songs more strange and curious.

James Baldwin in his essay "Stranger in the Village" www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/stranger.htm wrote:

"One of the things that distinquishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men and vice versa...It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

Songs have slipped across racial borders here in America for a very long time. When my mother died we cremated her body. So at her funeral in lieu of a casket we had a cupboard which we place some artifacts to remember her by. At the closing of the service the door of the cupboard was closed and locked so it could be carried out. The closing song was "We Shall Overcome." I told a friend in India about that and he recalled that they had sung "We Shall Overcome" at school.

"The melody heard in the first and last lines of this song has been traced back to the spiritual, "No More Auction Block for Me," which was sung by slaves in the 1800s." www.metascholar.org/MOSC/ess...rcome.htm And the song, perhaps more than any other is associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Still, the song means so much to so many; a song that captures what in the heart seemed so appropriate to remember my mother. Someday, we will walk hand in hand; someday we will live in peace, were words which resonated in the heart of a Republican woman from New England. They are words of redemption, words which remind us how good we can be.

Michelle Schocked www.michelleshocked.com/ in her notes to "Arkansas Traveler" said that the real roots of many of the songs on the collection are in blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minsrelsy is so strange, it's hard know where to beging to understand it. This essay I happened across, "Every Time I Turn Around: Rite, Reversal, and the end of blackface minstrelsy" www.angelfire.com/oh/hydrio.../crow.html is quite smart. The shorter version is to imagine these minstrel shows which were popular in the U.S. and Europe from 1840 onward as rites of reversal familiar to oral and literary traditions in many cultures. Comer provides this quote from "The London Illustrated News:"

"With white faces the whole affair would be intolerable. It is the ebony that gives the due and needful character to the monstrosities, the breaches of decorum, the exaggerations of feeling, and the "silly, sooth" character of the whole implied drama."

Minstrel shows provided the character Jim Crow whose name was applied to the draconian laws enforcing apartheid, but these shows also provided a forum for public criticism and satire. In blacking up the performers and audiences often received what they hadn't bargined for. The long popularity of minstrel shows, however made black performers a stereotype.

Leadbelly en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly had to contend with that stereotyping. And to an extent he played along for commercial advantage. The promotion of Leadbelly after the Lomaxes brought him to New York was heavy on "legend, and apparently the Lomaxes "hated that" www.bozosoft.com/mike/writ...belly.html Looking over pictures of album covers and promotional shots there are plenty that reflect the stereotype for example this picture home.online.no/~hansnb/hi.../songs.html But Ledbetter was conscious of his image and proud of his muscianship so there are other pictures as well, like the one shown at this blog.

Here's a good page with a biography of Woody Guthrie xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/R.../bio.html A performance in 1940 Guthrie played in a "Grapes of Wrath Evening", a benefit for the "John Steinbeck committee for Agricultural Workers" which featured Leadbelly and other folk singers the Lomaxes had recorded. Pete Seeger was also impressed and a broader audience for a beautiful American form of music emerged.

Perhaps it's important that Seeger is so closely associated with Ledbetter's signature song, "Goodnight Irene." But it was an immaculately dressed Ledbetter who brought audiences in direct contact with black music and not black face. Jazz muscians and most memorably Duke Ellington did so too, but Ellington never played the clown, and his urbane music wasn't so directly apprehended as drawn from a shared tradition of minstrelsy.

"Shaft" is probably Gordon Parks's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks best known film, but he also made a biographical film about Leadbelly www.soundunseen.com/2005/fil...ead-belly Ledbetter is one of the most important American musicians. His legacy also entails stepping out of the minstrel clown tradition allowing audiences to hear his songs directly and not through a curtain of farse. Park's film dramatically shows the tennor of the times which made life so difficult for the proud and talanted musician, Huddie William Ledbetter.

Songs have slipped across boundaries to an extent that now the boundaries have been stretched beyond recognition, such that as Baldwin observed: "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

Violent Memes

Preston Brooks a Congressman from South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner at his desk because Preston thought he's impunged his family's honor. Sumner died a few months after the attack, but I don't ever remember seeing that Brooks was prosecuted or ever censored for it. It's hard to see, but the Senators in the background have varying expressions on their faces, what's clear however was that the code was to stay out of it; apparently nobody thought the honorable thing to do was to intercede.

Separating out black history has some legitimacy, but the intertwined threads of the American experience make the exercise of seperating difficult. Tonight I went over some of the treads in various discussions where my whiteness had become an issue. Looking for other threads where that had come up, I discovered they'd been deleted. I'm willing to stipulate that "I don't get it" when it comes to my own conciousness of race, but I also think that some of the disputes in these threads have to do with difficulties separating out racial identities when so many experiences are shared.

Why is it that America is such a violent place? The rates of violent crimes differ significantly geographically too. White people in the South kill each other at twice the rate that people in the North do www.amazon.com/gp/product...006-6669561
The conclusion that Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen make is that the main reason for the difference is a "Culture of Honor" where a person's mosts prized possession is honor; honor in the sense that every insult must be retaliated against.

Dick Cheney was only the second Vice President to shoot a man while in office. Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. I don't have a link, but even Abraham Lincoln escaped a duel by fancy footwork on his behalf, so the sensibilities of the culture of honor run across the geography of America in history.

Fox Butterfied's "All God's Children: The Bosket FAmily and the American Traditon of Violence" www.amazon.com/gp/product...006-6669561 traces the history of Willie Bosket considered by some to be the most dangerous inmate in the history of the New York Penal system back through his family's violent men to slavery. But rather than to point to the brutality of the slave system as a cause, Butterfield notes that in Edgefield, South Carolina white on white violence predates white on black violence www.pbs.org/newshour/ger...terfield.html Butterfield finds that a violent meme, that is a socially constructed idea that's passed along, infected the people in an area and has continued to be passed along for generations.

From my experience living in South Carolina, and particularly thinking about the circumstances of my brother's murder there, this notion of a "Culture of Honor" as a meme has resonance. I'm no authority, of course, but I found Nisbett and Cohen's specualtions about the sources of this meme, particularly their contention that it's based in settlement patterns of Scots Irish en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot...h_American not so convincing. Again it's only incidental, but Western Pennsylvania has been shaped by the colonial era migrations of Scots Irish too, yet the prevelance of a similar sense of honor dosen't map with their thesis.

It is rather a digression, but Butterfield tells the story of how Strom Thurman's father killed a man over a perceived affront to his honor--the fellow had called him "a damned dog, a scondrel and a liar." It certainly didn't hurt his career any, in fact in sympathy a southern patron in government had him appointed US Attorney for South Carolina--talk about "right thinking" individuals! My little research adventure tonight began by looking for information about Strom Thurman, who I think was an important player in creating Black History in the latter half of the 20th century. I was a little taken aback to discover not so many pages about him. Jesse Helms another Southern racist, perhaps from his long career in radion and public relations, seems to have more foresight about promoting his legacy www.jessehelmscenter.com/default.asp I think it a mistake to forget either of them too quickly; the havoc in their wake is significant.

The broad brush of the Scots Irish as a peculiarly violent people is, I think, a stereotype. I enjoy reading Joe Bageant and in this piece "Revenge of the Mutt People" www.joebageant.com/joe/2006...the_.html he takes the ball and runs with it. Bageant is keen to talk about "my" people with affection and discust. Many Americans find their Identities plural, but not all Americans can easily bring forth talk about "my" people as Bageant does.

I have an interest in Africa, and like most area of intersts, I'm quite ignorant. Something that I've noticed is that African people in America are quite prickly about the way that Americans so loosely talk about "Africans." Multiple times I've heard: "There are over fifty different countries in Africa!" I heard a friend from Ghana remark that he didn't strongly identify as a Ghanaian until coming to study here in the U.S. The close associations with identities which African have are largely a mystery to most Americans and the whole topic of "tribalism" is even more dangerous than talk about "Africans."

It's assumed that an identity as "black" conjures up a very descrite expereince. It does because expereinces of racial prejudice is so very common here. Therefore a "white" identity also presumes a corallary eperience. Americans often see things through filters of white and black. But this doesn't preclude our plural identies, for example black Americans often consider themselves Southerners even while living in other regions of the country. The idea of a "Southerner" is neither black nor white. Also black Africans living in the U.S. are sometimes perplexed by the tensions with American blacks.

American history reveals that ideas about violence spread culturally. Groups of people do come up with ideas all the time, and many of them like fashions are distinctly retro. It does seem difficult to predict what ideas will spread and individual's plans to change the culture are probably delusional. Nevertheless we've got some ability to compose our lives and to keep a degree of flexibility about our overarching worldviews. The culturally transmitted ideas that make Americans peculiarly more violent are ideas deserving attention. Composing our lives to avoid violence depend on ideas worth spreading.

Violence has shaped us as Americans. It's something woven into our experience of racial identity that perhaps in a perverse way shines a light on a shared heritage of a strange construciton of honor.

Torchbearers

I live near Pittsburgh and I'm really fond of the place. Something about this place is that it seems everyone is only separated by one degree if you're not already friends. Because of this closeness it's almost a habit when meeting someone new to identify the way you're already connected. This habit takes newcommers by surprise and can lead them to feeling clostrophobic when there's no need to feel that way; oh well maybe there is. People here do have an interest in what neighborhoods you're from, who your people are, it's the essense of provencial.

In today's paper there's a review of a television documentary called "Torchbearers" www.post-gazette.com/pg/06056/660892.stm which deals with the lives of Pittsburghers influential during the Civil Rights Movement. The local public television station, WQED produces some fine documentaries about Pittsburgh history www.wqed.org/tv/pghist/index.shtml Here's the page on the new show to be shown on Thursday www.wqed.org/tv/specials/torchbearers/

Among the people whose stories are told in the documentary is Helen Faison. A few years back the Pittsburgh School Board sort of melted down. The superintendent was black and the disputes with the board definately had a racial component but the story is convoluted. Mainly it was a story about disfunctional local politics with race thrown in as part of the mess. What really tipped the apple cart was that local foundations said they were going to withdraw funding unless the board cleaned house and in the process the superintendent was asked to leave. The foundations didn't have a problem with the superintendent rather with the board, his dismissal was just part of the politics of it all. The city was in a real fix and needed to get somebody in the position of superintendent as a quick fix, and in an interim position until new school board elections and a search for a superintendent. They needed somebody beyond reproach and that person was Helen Faison.

Quite remarkably she came in and with a no-nonsense manner picked up the broken pieces and quite neatly stuck them back together again. Faison was the first female principal of a Pittsburgh school and also the first black principal. Being first like that sometimes seems like a back-handed compliment. It isn't the same as being "first in the class" or the best, but even if the first is the best what's remembered is being the first black or first woman. Something Faison said in the newspaper review impressed me about her career in the fifties:

"I didn't feel I was a heroine or anything," she said. "I was just doing what was my responsibility."

The list of people covered in the documentary are all well-known and clearly establishment figures locally. A friend complained recently about "Urban League" types being so out of touch. I guess because I'm older I recognise that many of the people he's thinking about expereinced more hardship than he assumes.

Faison's coment reminded me of Wangari Maathai en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai , ha, and in Pittsburgh style I'll point out she studied at the University of Pittsburgh. Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to champion the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. I saw her interviewed on TV and she remarked that it is important to understand that when they began planting trees they had no vision of creating a movement. They were planting trees to respond in what way they could to a need. Faison is saying something like that too. She's a champion for civil rights, but of the local, right here and now sort.

Others in the list are known for their local accomplishments. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary to see how they tell the story. Another person featured is Robert Lavelle. A realtor, he understood red-lining and set up a savings and loan so black people could get mortages. His influence on the community for the better was huge, but hard to explain in a dramatic fashion. Or at least it seems like that to me, I'll see how the filmmakers do on Thursday. Local action in the present doesn't seem very glamorous and history probably even less so, but right at the local level is where the greatest changes take place.

The picture is of a march in Selma a couple of weeks before Martain King's murder. The guy in the beard is Abraham Heschel, a Conservative Rabbi. I'm not sure why I'm using this picture. Partly because my search for local Pittsburgh pictures, while very interesting didn't turn up one I wanted to use. The local Carnegie Library has a wonderful colleciton of photos www.carnegielibrary.org/exhibit/ and it was fun learning a bit about that. Photo searching on the Web turns up such interesting results.

What made me pause with this photo was that it brought home the ways in which the morality, with a foundation in religion, in the Civil Rights Movement has a different character than the current religiousity. I'm not particularly religious, and while local religious leaders were important to the movement in many ways, I was impressed to see that "Torchbearers" chronicles the lives of civic leaders. They all might be personally religious, but the figures in this film were not advancing religious stands, rather civic ones. Nowadays it seems most talk of morality has a religious bent to it but Heshel's conviciton that social responsibility was a necessary part of his religious faith was not a popular position at the time. Indeed it seems that the connection between spiritual and religous matters to social and civic action was something movement participants were quite thoughtful about; whereas today's religious expressions so often seem careless, rote, knee jerk reactions writ large.

Here www.aril.org/king.html is a wonderful essay by theologian and social scholar Vincent Harding about Martin King and Abraham Heschel. Harding was an advisor to King and the first director of the King Center. I suppose if more religious people talked like Vincent Harding I'd be more disposed towards religion. Harding speaks of creativity and about being human, that those are the most important things. LIkewise Heschel draws attention to our essential human condition. Here's www.chosunjournal.com/heschel.html something Heschel wrote:

"To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him."

Maybe the masculine pronoun gives me pause, but the underlying idea is so different than the religiousity that's fueling imperial ambitions and religious authoritarianism of today. Here's www.pbs.org/wnet/religio.../harding.html an interview with the Drs. Harding from the PBS show "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly." Dr. Vincent Harding is a Christian theologian and yet in this interview doesn't invoke the name of Jesus. This passage from the interview moved me:

"I have long been very moved by one of the songs that was used in the movement, "This Little Light of Mine," which a lot of people knew from Sunday school and other settings, but which took on a whole meaning. I'm moved by what happened in Selma when they used that song in the midst of tremendous dangers and misuse and abuse by the authorities there. The young people sang, "I'm gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." Then they said, "Tell Governor Wallace..." But what they said was not, "Tell Governor Wallace he's a white honky and he's no good"; they simply used the song to say, "Tell Governor Wallace I'm gonna let it shine. ... Tell Chief Clark I'm gonna let it shine." They didn't need to attack those people; what they needed to do was powerfully, through the song, affirm that they had a spirit in them that they were going to share with the world, and no one in the world was going to stop them from doing it."

The expression of religious faith was important to the Civil Rights Movement. But I think it a mistake not to remember the dead-eye focus on civil matters. And that's what's so interesting to me about the local documentary coming up. almost all of the pricinpals in the local documentary are known for their civic contributions in education, housing, law and community issues. Religious faith, perhaps, informed their convictions, but their actions were toward practical and daily life issues.

Helen Faison came out of retirement to become interim school superintendent. The rhetoric that had caused the melt down was overheated. From day one she made it plain she wasn't going to listen to nonsense, but stick to the important day to day affairs of running the schools. No one dared to cross her or get in her way, yet she was always polite and unassuming in manner. At the time I hadn't known about her role in the contentious history of the Civil Rights struggle and racial politics. I see now that her brilliant performance in the this interim position came out of a lifetime of struggle for civil rights and the civic good.

Riots

I was lazy last night and really lazy tonight. There's so much on the Internet and it's so easy to go through pages quickly, but it's another matter altogether to process the information and to try to say something sensible about it.

I guess today I was trying to put what happened Greenwood Oklahoma--the Tulsa Riots--into context, to figure out a way of wrting about them. The Watts Riot of 1965 came to mind en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_riots and then tried to figure how that fit into the story in any way. And then oddly I thought of the Wall Street Bombing of 1920 which doesn't have anything to do with Black history on the face of it, but it's so easy to look things up en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall...et_bombing

I'm not religious, a Quaker or anything like that, but I do deplore violence. I'm a bit of a hot head, at least no stranger to anger. I also don't want to hurt anyone. So I guess part of what makes me, well, me, is trying to join up these two parts of myself.

I was at a protest outside an event where a spokesperson for the government of the Sudan was speaking. A fellow I know, who's a Southern Sudanese was there.

The conflicts in Sudan are rather difficult to follow. There was a long civil war, basically a north/south conflict that lasted for 20 years or more. My friend is a refugee from that conflict. A very tentative peace was made. But the western region of Darfur felt they were getting screwed after the peace arrangements over north/south were being resolved--Urg, it's hard to make this short. One of the ways that the civil war was portrayed was Arab versus African. This was so confusing to Americans because in the pictures everyone looks the same, that is Arab Sudanese don't look like Lebanese to us. But generally in the south many were Christian or followers of Animist religions whereas the people in the north were Muslim who controlled the government. In Darfur it's still the government who is behind the militias driving people from their land and causing terrible destruction, but the overwhelming majority--over 90%--of the people in Darfur are Muslim too.

Okay, so the program where the Sudan government could make their case was sponsored in part by black American Muslims who find common cause with the government of Sudan. The protest outside was small, maybe 35--50 people and well behaved. Most of the attendees simply ignored us, but a few were confrontational. The calm and reasonable replies my friend from the Sudan made just amazed me. I would have blown a gasket if I'd try to engage the hecklers.

That's way too long a digression, but I admire my friend so much, not just because of his cool but his many accomplishments. But it is that cool I always notice. I know he feels passionately, that anger swells in him too. But he's able to balance and master his movements so as not to perpetuate violence. Yet he confronts injustice forcefully!

It's not the picture I chose, but the second picture on this page www.africanamericans.com/WattsRiots.htm shows Bayard Rustin and Martin King in Watts during the riots. There's something in the way Rustin is laboring a drag on a cigarette and the look on King's face that makes me Imagine that "holy f***k" was running around in their minds the whole time. The riots ocurred a week after the Voting Rights Act passed.

Back to the Wall Street bombing, it was an act of terrorism. Anarchists were probably to blame, and took the blame, but they never actually figured out who did the bombing. One of the ideas of some of the Anarchists of the day was "propaganda by the deed" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop...y_the_deed and the idea had Americans devoted to it. The short version is to make the masses rise up by fomenting some catastrophy.

I haven't read enough to know whether any of the Black Power adherents were following this anarchist doctrine of propaganda by the deed, but their reasoning seems similar. My politics lean left. A freind of mine said "It's not so much that I'm a leftist, I just can't stand what the radical right stands for" and that captures my feelings pretty well. So when I began reading John McWhorter's take on the Watts riots as in this Washington Post piece www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...03.html I took notice that he's affiliated with The Manhattan Institute a rightist-think tank www.manhattan-institute.org/html...r.htm I can certainly see where McWhorter would be popular with the right, but he's a very serious thinker and his ideas not easily dismissed. Here's an essay on affirmative action in college admissions www.edge.org/documents/a.../edge45.html I come down generally in favor of such programs, but his arguments are good ones for the other side. The short take on his views of Watts is that the black community got burned by people acting out rebellion for it's own sake.

Via a post at Nathan Zuckerman's blog where he's blogging the TED (Technology, Entertainment Design) Conference www.ted.com/ in Silicon Valley is a short take on Nat Irvin www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/ Zuckerman writes:

"His key idea is the vision of a new society where a black culture is emerging around people who are not just surviving, but thriving. These new leaders, over the past few decades, will become anew urban tribe of competitive, critical thinkers and meme spreaders."

McWhorter makes a related point noting that most black people in America are not poor. Irvin makes the point (I can't find the link) that marches and much of the direct non-violent actions of the past generation Civil Rights leaders won't work anymore, unless the march is over something that specifically targets the black community against all others. The political landscape has changed. But I'm afraid we haven't seen the last of riots, it's an American traditon; this link provides a very good and brief history of race riots www.findarticles.com/p/artic...19101006

The history of non-violent resistence is very important, but I agree with Irvin's point that the tactics which were used effectively in the past aren't immediately applicable to today's social landscape. I'm sure I have differences with McWhorter's take on things, I'll have to find out more, nevertheless it would seem that the riots, and the Watts riot his Washington Post piece references had little redeeming value; the fallout was almost entirely negative, just as he suggests.

Both as a personal matter, that is wanting to do no harm, and also living in a time when terrorism is becoming more prevelant, I very drawn to the problem of taking action against the injustices that make me so angry in ways that actually tend towards peace and justice. Rustin was a life-long adherent of non-violence. He abhorred the violence of the Watts Riots, but would not condem the rioters. Not quite sure what to make of that, and perhaps it was a bit similar ot the situation which Gandhi found himself in near the end of his life with Hindu and Muslim violence exploding all around him. It's good to look towards history, but all of us are faced with composing our lives now and in the present. The problem of violence is daunting.

Greenwood Oklaholma

I'm lazy tonight but the Tulsa race riots in 1921are worth delving into deeper. There are so many layers and threads to the story. But the important first step is just to remember. advant.blogspot.com/2006/02/...s-us.html is the link that reminded me of this tragic story. Something in the comments was the discussion of MOVE en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE and the comment that "nobody's ever heard of them."

Just made me think how easy it to forget, some quite important stories are quite hard to tell. There's a movie made "Black Wall Street" about the Tulsu riot www.houseofnubian.com/IBS/Sim...465.html I haven't seen it. One of the filmmakers became interested in telling the story because nobody knew about it. Nobody remembered that one day in June 1921 thousands were forced from their homes and the whole Greewood section, "Little Africa" and the "Black Wall Street' torched. More than a hundred killed and many more died of injuries in internment camps. "Who knew?"

Romare Bearden

My first and only visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was with a friend and artist very familiar with the place. We hit some of the exhibits and then he took me up to the Asian collection. I was experiencing sensory overload, so we took a break and went out to eat and then came back refreshed. I was in awe of the place, never quite believing how big it is. Spending a day there is merely to get an impression of the place. At the bottom of a staircase my friend beckoned me to hurry my descent. On the wall was a painting by Romare Bearden, I don't remember the title of the piece or what my friend said. What I remember is his reverance for the piece and the artist. A short bio of Bearden here: www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld.../bearden.html

One of the great things about a post about an artist is so many great links to Webpages to see pictures! With that I'll unload a bunch of links where you can see my friend's pictures and more www.davidpohl.com/ findthetimetorhyme.blogspot.com/
loopyoga.blogspot.com/ and vastlesssmudge.blogspot.com/

Those links don't have much to do about Black History Month, or Romare Bearden except to say that Bearden was an important influence on my friend. Lists of important American artists of the 20th century are sure to include Bearden. The picutre credit is Frank Stewart, and I suspect he must have been Bearden's friend because he's credited with many of the photos of Bearden. The fellow on the left is Albert Murray and Bearden in the coveralls on the right. I love the photo first because it's the view that inspired his six-panel collage "The Block." Check out this wonderful site by the Metropolitan www.metmuseum.org/explore/t...guide.html And I love the coveralls. Another of my friends, a distinquished retired professor of medicine and sculpture wears coveralls and gets teasing behind his back about them. The point is that making art is work where work clothes are appropriate.

Bearden was prolific, working in numerous media. He vreated this great volume of art all the while during the period between 1935-1969 working as a social worker in Harlem. A very learned man, but hardly an "ivory tower intellectual." Bearden remarked:

“You should respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything that is where it comes from.”

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, a city I've lived in and moved with his family to Pittsburgh, the city near where I live, before settling in New York City. So especially the Pittsburgh connection, and his art that incorporates Pittsburgh scenes give me a hook for his work. Another native son, August Wilson credits Bearden as an influence www.dartmouth.edu/~awilson/...chaos.html Wilson:

"What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence."

In the mid 1960's Bearden formed the Spiral Group to engage black artists in contributing to the Civil Rights Movement. During that period he perfected photomontage users.aol.com/MenuBar/bea.../bearden.htm Images today with Photoshop seem familiar. I wonder if even with Photoshop people would realise what one could do without Bearden's example?

In this case, "a picture is worth a thousand words" so allow me to give you some links. Jerry Jazz Musician Site www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm is the place to go if you only choose one site to visit. The University of Pennsylvania has a great site to view some of Bearden's print making www.upenn.edu/ARG/archive...bearden.html And visit The Bearden Foundation site if you've got the time www.beardenfoundation.org/

Appropriately Bearden's work is great for arts educators and here are a couple of sites with some more images and a view towards educators: www.albrightknox.org/ArtStar...den.html and the pages by The National Museum of Art www.nga.gov/exhibitions/beardeninfo.htm

He shared a set of grandparents with Duke Ellington and knew many of the leading lights of Harlem and beyond. Passionate about learning, he also authored several books. Bearden was a seminal artist whose art and vision continues to inspire.

Fugitive Slave Law

Trying to pick out important pieces of the history of black people in America is hard. It is like a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces interesting in and of themselves and important to the whole. The difference is that remarkable black individuals each have their own story, which is part of the bigger story, but it's not always easy to tell about the context of their lives without picking up the narrative of the broader influences upon their lives. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugi...aw_of_1850 is an important piece providing context, especially for understanding Abolitionist and the escalation of violence culminating in the Civil War.

This excellent page of Eric Fonner of Columbia University put up by PBS www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3094.html provides some insight into the law and its significance. I will also add that it's merely one page in a treasure trove of information about the experience of Africans in America. You can access other pages by choosing the links at the top of the page.

While many northern states made laws prohibiting slavery, Fonner points out that it was a national institution and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 helped to bring the conflict over slavery to the national stage. He says:

"The Constitution has a clause stating that fugitives from labor (slaves) must be sent back to the South if captured in the North. And this gave slavery what we call extra-territoriality. That is, it made slavery a national institution. Even though the northern states could abolish slavery, as they did, they still could not avoid their Constitutional obligation to enforce the slave laws of the southern states. A fugitive slave carried with him the legal status of slavery, even into a territory which didn't have slavery."

Fonner points out that the southern states' insistance about "state's rights" was phony; the insistance was for slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law "was the most powerful exercise of federal authority within the United States in the whole era before the Civil War" he says. With Abolitionist feelings running high in the North and a general preference for the power of states to make law, the federal marshal operating with bounty hunters were an afront not just to black people (free people of color were always in danger of being kidnapped) but also to free white people in the north.

Ripon Booth's War www.wlhn.org/topics/boot...ar_intro.htm which began in the spring of 1854 with the arrest of Sherman Booth the editor of an Abolitionist paper the "Free Democrat" in Milwaulkee. There were few supporters of slavery in Wisconson and Booth's arrest led to a series of court challenges that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Legal issues so often seem dry and arcane, and very often unsatisfying; very much in the manner of a judge's retort to the protests of a convicted prisoner: "This is a Court of Law not a Court of Justice!" The case that found it's way to the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with important issues of federalism and the Court ruled in favor of federal power over state's power. When Federal Marshals arrested Booth he was "liberated" by friends and the long search to find him was covered sensationally in the press. For some the incident when it finally came to a head in 1860, and the attention paid to it, not just in Wisconson but around the country, represented the responsibility to the high ideals of the nation's founding, while to others grew fearful of the polarization dividing the land.

It's rather remarkable how the Red state/Blue state map of president Bush's election win so neatly matches the divide in the country at that time. Indeed today we are polarized too and the fault lines are still very often about race. This page the U.S. Marshall's put up has a great picture depicting a Marshal and a bounty hunter chasing a young woman and her child. They juxtapose that picture with a photograph of Federal Marshals enforcing school desegregation at a school in New Orleans. The basic message is "We're just doing our job." That seemed unsatisfying to me, but it's a helpful reminder that as a citizen I have a responsibility to impress my representatives with my views of justice and to hold them accountable for their lawmaking. (Right here and now I'm boiling mad about the crooks their corruption!)

The Fugitive Slave Law impinges on other important developments of the day, in particular the westward expansion and the quest for American Empire. In the military today it's common for them to speak of the military operations "against the terrorists" as "Indian Wars." It's unsettling to hear that rhetoric, although I understand that it comes from many streams of the U.S. Army's history and tradition--that glum reality. While the Fugitive Slave Law was not enforced by the military, rather the iron fist of statist power, the tactics used by the state in both by Federal Marshals and the Army in the Indian wars can both be called "terroristic." The institution of slavery required a police state to maintain it.

I'm not bright or savvy enough to really identify what it is we here in America are so polarized about today. But one of the areas which there is real division is the arrest, kidnapping, redition, and torture at the dictate of the president. I'm quite at a loss to understand why so many find the application of these powers a good thing, but they do. Naturally in the mid-nineteenth century many felt the police state worked to their advantage; I suppose the same is true today.

It's just me, and I know it, but growing up in the South as a boy when I would hear racial invective, I always felt like that hatred was directed at me too. I was born in Virginia, but with parents from New England, I never was regarded as a southern boy, and I knew they hated yankees. What I didn't grasp fully was the complection of my skin entitled membership into the clan, albeit on a lower rung. My parent's sometimes called me their "Rebel child" something I always took as endearing. But I never took to the Confederate Stars and Bars. A neighbor has one emblazened on their silo here in western Pennsylvania! I strongly suspect some of the pleasure I felt in being called a "Rebel" is the pleasure they find in flying that damned flag. I can't understand their shamelessness about it though.

There are lots of civil war resources on the Web with images from the period. Here's a site with some pictures from the era xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/J...itive.htm The National Park Service has some great pages and I got the image used from pages from the Boston African American National Historic Site www.nps.gov/boaf/fugitiveslavelaw.htm Here are some more images www.historywiz.com/gallerie...riend.htm Dogs were so important not only for tracking, but clearly from the images for intimidation as well.

I'm a real wuzz when it comes to depictions of violence, particularly in movies. It's rather embarassing really and as a result I miss out on some worthwhile films. So when videos of beheadings find their way to the Internet, you can be sure I don't view them. With the recent release by Australian Public Television of a second set of photos of tourture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq I probably would have escaped seeing any of them, if not for a blog called Bagnews Notes and this post there bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagne..._.html The pictures of a soildier using a dog to intimidate a bound prisoner aren't the most graphic (in fact the one which made my stomach churn has no prisoner in it at all, just a floor spattered with his blood) nevertheless I thought of those Abu Gharib pictures when I saw so many pictures of dogs in the fugitive slave pictures of the era.

State power is mighty. All of the cruelty we might imagine, and even more, has been used by agents of state power through history. Now an unprecidented military is fighting an agressive war spanning numerous countries all over the world. Agents of presidential power, in contravention of foreign laws, international treaties, and our own laws, are kidnapping and rendering people into the hands of bruts for turtoure. We operate torture facilities in multiple places and on ships flying my flag. All of this with the pretense of legal power granted to the president through authorization by Congress for operations in Afghanistan. At home our communications are being intercepted, outside legal procedures in place and without oversight, at the command of the president with the same legal justification. These are some of the issues polarizing us in the U.S. today, and the map reads red and blue. Like in the days of the Fugitive Slave Act the South demanded "State's Rights" all the while vigorously demanding federal enforcement brutality in defense of their "peculiar institution."

So now the "limited government" Republicans holding all levers of federal powers ridicule and disparrage those of us who want checks on presidental powers and the rule of law. What an irony that it's the party of Lincoln advancing these horors.

Cultural Pluralisms

Carter G. Woodson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_G._Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926 and expanded into Black History Month in 1976 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blac...tory_Month It's a disgrace that I know so little about the history of black people in the U.S. That ignorance is compounded by my more general ignorance of history.

As a young child, I liked nothing better than to hear my father tell me stories about when he was a little boy. I learned so much from my mother and indeed some stories about her youth. Many of those stories I remember best were told in the few years before she died. She was very good about reading us stories and listening to the stories we told her, but she never quite had the nack my father had of placing herself at the center of the story's action. Those personal stories don't inform about history the way that history texts do, but provided a foundation upon which to build some understanding of history. Something I learned about history from them both is they grew up in The Great Depression.

I've always been interested in the stories other families tell. What becomes evident in listening to those, is they might not be exactly true, which introduces skepticism about the veracity of my own family stories, and directing attention to the stories not told.

It's been a long time since the first Negro History Week. Spending a little time for the last while thinking and trying to find out more about black history, I begin to wonder about the veractiy of some stories and stories not told. The last post about Bayard Rustin put his gay sexuality on the table. Nosey as I am, I began to wonder about his lovers, and the pleasant surprise is to discover that his last partner outlives him and lives in the same apartment they shared.

The picture is of Alain LeRoy Locke. I had never heard of Locke until a few years back I read Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club:A Story of Ideas in America." The book is about how the philosophy of pragmatism came about. Locke is an important figure in American history. Menand writes rather matter of factly about Locke:

"He had heart trouble and an unusually slight physique (he was five feet tall and wieghed 90 pounds); he was homosexual; and he was black."

One of the pleasures in reading Menand's book is that it's full of gossip (factually researched) about the elite scholars of a generation. Locke enters the narrative late in the book, so I was prompted to question: "Oh yeah, I wonder how that worked out for him? Unfortunately Menand doesn't offer other juicy tidbits about Locke and pretty much drops him like a hot potato after presenting some of his ideas Locke was advancing at the time of his Rhodes Scholar years at Oxford. Locke was the first black Rhodes Scholar from America in 1907.

Locke never got arrested for indecency, so most of the pages I've read about him do not reference being gay, or as Menad wrote: a homosexual. This page delves into the matter a little www.glbtq.com/literature/...issance.html

"Without question a misogynist, Locke's contribution to the development of a gay male literary heritage was formidable and certainly deliberate. He was at the center of the Harlem gay coterie and very early on gave impetus to the careers of Cullen and, especially, Hughes."

"Without question" generally prompts questions in my mind, but the only support for that assertion is that in Locke's great influence on the Harlem Renaissance he acted to advance the careers of black men to the neglect of black women.

Alain Locke was quiet about his sexuality in an era when polite people didn't entertain questions about people's sexual lives, so it's a bit of a detour in discussing the life and accomplishment Alain Locke. But it does seem significant that many of the leading light of the Harlem Renaissance were lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgender and that only so many years later that demands for tolerance for people expressing various sexualities became public demands.

In the current culture wars in the United States cultural pluralism, an idea which Locke advanced and developed over his long career is still a hot button subject. While Locke never directly asserted gay pride, his ideas about cultural pluaralism are a part of the modern gay movement. And the assults on multiculturalism against his ideas about pluralism. Menand writes of pluralism:

"The universe is plural; it hangs together, but in more ways than one. Reality, as William James liked to say is distributive, by which he meant that things are connected loosely, provisionally, and every which way, and not as in a monistic philosopy like Hegel's , logically, ineluctably, and in one ultimate and absolute way. 'Everything is many directional, many dimensional, in its external relations' James wrote in a notebook."

Locke was able to pull together a coherrent philosphical construction out of the many threads available at the time for understanding and dealing with multi-ethnic America. Locke was a modernist, after having left Oxford he studied in Berlin for a year in the epicenter of modernist philosopy. Menand writes of Locke: "he was a follower of George Santayana and a philosophical aesthete." Although Menand makes no mention Locke also joined the Baha'i faith en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%...3%AD_Faith in 1918. So Locke, if not a monist like Hegal, clearly held universalist ideas humanity and so his cultural pluralism seems a bit at odds with that and require further explanation.

Menand discusses at some length a series of lectures Locke gave in 1915 at Howard Universtiy www.howard.edu/ and institution Locke where Locke taught until his retirement in 1954, "Race Contacts and Interracial Relations". In those lectures Locke presented a modernist. As Menand explains:

"Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived cyclical. In premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents follwed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life."

Nowadays, in these modern times, it's not the case. Mostly we try to avoid obsolecence by constantly inventing new ways to live our lives. Locke argued that it was a mistake to cling to ethnic identity; a mistake in that in modernity we were forging a new identity (Locke well understood the international and not merely national scope of modernism). Racial identiy was socially divisive to this project, nevertheless because people want to be accepted like everyone else and take satisfaction in themselves and members of their group, racial pride was a means to get a right conception of their identity as black folks.

Menand on Locke:

"Universality and diversity are both effects of social practice. They are not given in nature; they are outcomes of what people do."

Locke used the ideas he developed during these lectures when he published and anthology , "The New Negro" what is sometimes referred to as the manifesto of "the New Negro Movement."

Locke has an important place in American philosophy and literary studies, and cultural studies. He would be remembered with distinction for his early work alone. The American Philosophical Society page on Alain Locke is a good portal for further understanding of his contributions in these areas www.alainlocke.com/

Significant also was his long career as a university professor. Locke was a champion for adult education program in the 1930s and 1940s. He collected African art and was an Africanist pressing for Black Studies departments at the university level. A year after his retirement Howard initiated a a Black studies department.

One final anecdote is this gleened from an obituary of Ossie Davis www.boston.com/news/globe...vist_at_87/

"His activism began early. In 1935, he and a friend tried to enlist in the Ethiopian army to fight Mussolini's invasion. Unable to do so, he hitchhiked to Washington, where he enrolled at Howard University to study with the noted black intellectual Alain Locke.

Locke encouraged Mr. Davis in his aspirations to act, direct, and write. At the end of his junior year, he moved to New York to work in the theater. He joined a small stage company in Harlem and became acquainted with such writers as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Richard Wright."

Locke's contributions continue to hold relevance and have effect today. With his brilliant intellect and long and storied career, more in-deapth reading would be worthwhile. The DC Library link has many references www.dclibrary.org/blkren/bi...ockea.html