Incompentent Gardener

Make a Simple Paper Hat

johnpowers — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 21:53:28 GMT

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

johnpowers — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 05:18:37 GMT

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. http://www.al.com/unseen/ Newsworthy indeed.

Songs Are Sneaky Things

johnpowers — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:01:41 GMT

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 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week620/harding.html. I thought about writing about Fanny Lou Hamer http://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 http://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" http://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." http://www.metascholar.org/MOSC/essays/overcome.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 http://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" http://www.angelfire.com/oh/hydriotaphia/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 http://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" http://www.bozosoft.com/mike/writings/leadbelly.html Looking over pictures of album covers and promotional shots there are plenty that reflect the stereotype for example this picture http://home.online.no/~hansnb/historie/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 http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/RADIO/woody/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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks best known film, but he also made a biographical film about Leadbelly http://www.soundunseen.com/2005/films/lead-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

johnpowers — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:22:40 GMT

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 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813319935/sr=8-1/qid=1141017074/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6934006-6669561?%5Fencoding=UTF8 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" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0380728621/sr=8-1/qid=1141005147/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6934006-6669561?%5Fencoding=UTF8 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 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/butterfield.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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots-Irish_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 http://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" http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2006/01/revenge_of_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

johnpowers — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 06:39:57 GMT

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" http://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 http://www.wqed.org/tv/pghist/index.shtml Here's the page on the new show to be shown on Thursday http://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 http://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 http://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 http://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 http://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 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week620/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

johnpowers — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 06:53:03 GMT

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 http://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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_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 http://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" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_by_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 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300103.html I took notice that he's affiliated with The Manhattan Institute a rightist-think tank http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mcwhorter.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 http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/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 http://www.ted.com/ in Silicon Valley is a short take on Nat Irvin http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=416 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 http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419101006 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

johnpowers — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:29:38 GMT

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. http://advant.blogspot.com/2006/02/tulsa-ok-1921-us-government-bombs-us.html is the link that reminded me of this tragic story. Something in the comments was the discussion of MOVE http://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 http://www.houseofnubian.com/IBS/SimpleCat/Product/asp/product-id/870465.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

johnpowers — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 04:26:34 GMT

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: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/arts/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/ http://findthetimetorhyme.blogspot.com/ http://loopyoga.blogspot.com/ and http://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 http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/the_block/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 http://www.dartmouth.edu/~awilson/Bearden/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 http://users.aol.com/MenuBar/bearden/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 http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=bearden.html 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 http://www.upenn.edu/ARG/archive/bearden/bearden.html And visit The Bearden Foundation site if you've got the time http://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: http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/lBearden.html and the pages by The National Museum of Art http://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

johnpowers — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:05:52 GMT

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Law_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 http://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 http://www.wlhn.org/topics/boothwar/booth_war_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 http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-fugitive.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 http://www.nps.gov/boaf/fugitiveslavelaw.htm Here are some more images http://www.historywiz.com/galleries/slavesfriend.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 http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2006/02/media_coverage_.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

johnpowers — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 07:54:24 GMT

Carter G. Woodson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_G._Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926 and expanded into Black History Month in 1976 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_History_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 http://www.glbtq.com/literature/harlem_renaissance.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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%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 http://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 http://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 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2005/02/05/ossie_davis_star_of_stage_and_screen_activist_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 http://www.dclibrary.org/blkren/bios/lockea.html

Creative Trouble

johnpowers — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 05:13:10 GMT

Bayard Rustin lived to the age of 75 and died in 1987. He said: "I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble." Unlike Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. who were cut down in their prime, Rustin lived a normal life span. So he managed in a lifetime of creative trouble making to build a number of bridges only to see them burn. And managed to reflect on a lifetime of experiences. I'm not sure it's really true that he's the civil rights pioneer who nobody knows. But it probably is fair to say that many who think of Rustin believe that he doesn't get the recognition he deserves because he was gay. This article by Keith Boykin http://www.keithboykin.com/arch/000542.html takes at face value that Rustin was kept in the background because he was gay. But this article at Race Matters http://www.racematters.org/bayardrustinbooks.htm takes a different view: "However, it does not minimize recognition of the venomous bigotry directed at gay people to note that Rustin's civil rights activism was virtually unimpaired by his homosexuality or (remarkably) by his arrest record -- no small matter in a movement predicated on moralism." Most of the days that Rustin lived, the word "gay" had a different common meaning that it does today. Looking at pictures of him and reading accounts of being around him, he seems so gay in the old-fashioned sense. Here's a page for a film about Rustin, "Brother Outsider" http://www.rustin.org/ Look at the press photos at the PBS program POV which aired the film http://www.pbs.org/pov/utils/pressroom2002/brotheroutsider/photos.html A mighty happy man, and deadly serious too. Non-violence seems pretty safe to teach the children about, except films like "Eyes on the Prize" always seem to raise the hackles in a rather organized way whenever they are shown in schools. (Mentioning that film provides and excuse for this link http://www.moviemaker.com/hop/vol3/04/editing.html to movie maker Sam Pollard involved in both "Eyes on the Prize" and "Brother Outsider") Bayard Rustin was committed to non-violence in a strongly ideological way, going so far to object to armed security guards protecting Martin Luther King's home in Atlanta. Rustin was imprisoned twenty two times for his non-violent protest , so non-violence doesn't seem so safe afterall. Rustin did get quite a lot of press in the day. Malcolm X liked debate as a medium for getting his message out and debated Rustin several times. Here's a transscrip of a 1960 debate between the two http://www.socialdemocrats.org/rusmalx.html And this page is a time line of Malcolm X http://www.brothermalcolm.net/mxtimeline.html where debates with Rustin are deemed significant. Bayard Rustin was hardly invisible and behind the scenes. If Bayard Rustin isn't a household name today, it stems in part to his commitment to non-violent creative trouble making. What James Farmer called "new weapons" the powers that be are just as happy to be de-fangged. But another reason may be that after several decades of organizing protests during the Johnson administration Rustin like Farmer turned to cooperative politics. Stephen Steinberg makes the case in "Bayard Rustin and the Rise and Decline of the Black Protest Movement" http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue23/steinb23.htm The left viewed his collaboration with Johnson at best falling prey to a trap and at worst betrayal. Again the excellent resources from PBS POV to compliment the film "Brother Outsider" are invaluable here http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2002/brotheroutsider/rustin.html are several of Rustin's imporatnt writings, including "Vietnam: Where I stand" which provoked a break with so many. Rustin's commitment to the Labor Movement seems almost quaint in background of today's right wing ascendency. But in his later years he helped to form and run the A. Philip Randolph Institute the senior constituency group of the AFL-CIO http://www.apri.org/ht/d/sp/i/227/pid/227 With so many good pictures of Rustin to choose, I choose this one of Rustin at Trafalgar Square in London. First of all because it provides an excuse to link to this Nat Hentoff Village Voice Article http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0304,hentoff,41321,6.html which includes the photo and very warm remenisances of Rustin. Second because it was taken by Walter Naegle Rustin's partner for ten years before his death. Rustin led a complicated life, complicated like all of our lives are. But who demands our heros and leaders should be eunuchs? From this Web page http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue23/steinb23.htm is a revealing quote from Rustin about his life's work: "My activism did not spring from being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me."

"History is not an abstraction. Free Speech Is."

johnpowers — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 07:05:04 GMT

One of the nice things about blogging here is knowing that hardly anyone will read it. The downside of not provoking discussion. That's what tribes are for I suppose. One of my favorite blogs is Gukira http://gukira.blogspot.com/ which probably has been around since 2004 but I only discovered recently. It seems the archives is limited to the latest 10 posts, but maybe I'm missing something. The author of the blog Keguro Macharia is a Kenyan living in semi-rural Massachusetts and teache Enlish at the University level. Keguro also used to frequent Tribe.net, but not anymore. I was really quite excited to discover his blog via comments he left at another blog. Grr...I rather wish these blogs at tribe weren't a gated community. Keguro did a powerful post "Cartoons" http://gukira.blogspot.com/2006/02/cartoons.html#comments He writes: "To trace a history of cartoons in Euro-America is to trace a history of race relations." It's a powerful post, and if you have an inclination click and read it now, because I'm not sure whether his blog simply doesn't provide links to his archives, or his archives are limited to the ten latest posts. One of the commenters to the post suggested that Keguro must have seen The Jim Crow Museum http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/ He hadn't, but knows his subject matter very well. The reason is not simply because Keguro is very erudite, which he most certainly is, it's also that as a Kenyan and an outsider he can gain perspective on rascism in America, as an outsider. Here's a post I did on my blog linking to the Jim Crow Museum http://bazungubucks.blogspot.com/2005/12/contortions-sophomoric-suggestion.html In any case the excellent online presence of the Jim Crow Museum is an important resource for understanding black history in America. As are the history of cartoons as Keguro realtes with great force. I was still mulling Barbara Summer's (the editor of Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portrait of Black Women Who Changed the World) observation about the women's stories: "so much love in anger" when I read his piece. I also had in mind the powerful words of black voices I've been reading lately. I left comments: Indeed cartoons trace a history of race relations. And your post makes the point well. Still for students delving into their history there are words. It's great that you cite Houston Baker because while the literature is surely a part of "black critical memory" literature like blues music transmutes the pain. Baker makes black literature available to students through his many books. The photographer Brian Lanker did an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America." He interviewed the women. Barbara Summers edited the material for the companion book. She wrote about editing the material: "A truly beautifying discovery for me was to find so much love in anger. It was a fist-up, death defying love that challenged the unfair conditions of life and muscled in on injustice as it nursed both sides of a nation." Memory is critical. The ugly should not be hidden. But to discover "love in anger" and art, music and literature is the most direct ways for students to find it, perhaps helps to bare the burden history weighs upon us. Keguro responded: I have no problem with affirmation. But racial history (and no one is talking about the history of the Ottoman empire, surely an even more impressive empire than the British) is not pretty, is not affirmative, demands we feel guilt and shame. As long as we refuse to own up to these pasts, "liberal" democracies will replay racism in the name of free speech. History does not let us off the hook in search of an ideal. History is not an abstraction. Free Speech Is. Before the journalists attack me. I will write it again. History is not an abstraction. Free Speech Is. I not so sure that history isn't an abstraction nor that Free Speech always is. But that discussion is best left for another place--as if I were really smart enough to--however Keguro's point about affirmation seems quite important. "[Racial history] demands we feel guilt and shame." A hair shirt is always a difficult fashion decision, reserved for pennance. What I understand from Keguro is that unless we are willing to feel the pain and shame which history imposes, we will not be able to firm a purpose for amendment. I"m not finding now, but I read about Dr. David Pigrim who is the driving force behind the Jim Crow Museum. He'd collected racisist memerobilia and was showing some of it to two guests at his home, a black woman and a white man. After the woman left Pilgrim noticed the man was crying, and the man said, "I'm sorry." So significant was the sincere contrition and the words "I'm sorry" were like a weight lifted from Pilgrim. The experience help solidify his idea that a museum of racisist artifact could enable transformative change. I'm not sure, except to say that change doesn't happen in a moment. I know from many interactions with black people that I still don't "get it" my heart judged not contrite enough. Thinking of "love in anger" my thoughts turned to Thelonious Sphere Monk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk. I'm not sure why really, and lord knows I'm unqualified to write much about such a musical giant. Implicit in Keguro's contention that history is not abstract is a presumption that the study of history be rigorous. The trouble is people make up stories in their heads about history, at least I do. One of the aspects of the stroy in my head about Thelonious Monk is the devotion between mim and his wife Nellie. Another is the considerable speculation about the nature of Monk's mental illness. In my story of Monk love takes center stage, not only his love for Nellie, but her love for him. Monk's son T. S. Monk, Jr. http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/TS_Monk.html is such a good talker. When I've heard him speak about life with his father as a child, love come through; how as a child his playing under the piano with his sister, they knew all was right, their dad was cool. There's an anger part too. I don't know enough, but Bebop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop had a political element, as T.S, Monk notes somewhere in this interview http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/linernotes/monkchap.html When I was young I never had many records. Probably same as today part of getting together with firends was to share music, except it was much harder to do, we had to go listen. "Underground" was a record I remember http://www.slate.com/id/2088132/ And the cover of that record makes me think of anger too, at least the idea of Bebop having a political element. And then of course was Monk's distain for the police; two incidents are well known: sitting in a car with Bud Powell the police searched it and found drugs and Monk wouldn't testify against Powell; and an incident in Delaware with a Rothschilde heiress where he was beaten bloody. Too many cool pictures of Thelonious Monk, and just an image search is a fun Internet excursion. This photo is a postcard I scanned, but I don't know the credits--so it's a rip off. Two great pictures here http://www.sjohansen.de/monk.htm From the "Drummer World" link http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/TS_Monk.html Shortly after his father passed away leaving a rich and legendary legacy and, tragically, his sister died of cancer. To honor his father's legacy and support the efforts of education, Thelonious turned his attention toward forming the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. As Chairman, Thelonious has been at the forefront of helping to create a number of programs that range supporting after-school athletic programs. The Institute's activities reach from Boston to Los Angeles sponsoring music education for students in the form of full scholarships to funding and supplies and from New York to Orlando. T. S. Monk, Jr. is an enormously successful promoter of Jazz and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz http://www.monkinstitute.com/ does great work and is a fun Web site to puruse. Monk in this 1965 interview http://www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews/Thelonius%20Monk.htm said: "I’ve never wished for anybody else’s job. I enjoy what I do and I’m myself all the time. And I’ll continue to be me." His life and legacy are and affirmation of composer of of great music and a full life. Keguro suggests that we must come face to face with the tragedy of history, to feel the pain and shame. But surely tragedy doesn't preclude affirmation, rather just that we don't conclude a happy ending. We still have time to compose our lives, surely compassion is essential: "love in anger."

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

johnpowers — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 02:48:21 GMT

I'm still a little uncomfrotable about making Black History Month posts on biographies, but I'm without method. In my babbling on yesterday it occurred to me that I ought to start looking for women to write about. And what came to mind with that is a treasured book on the bookself, "I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America" by Brian Lanker. The book appears to be out of print, but is worth looking for used. Lanker is a fantastic portrait photographer, so the 75 portraits are a joy to behold. Each portait page is balanced with a page of text drawn from Lanker's interviews with the subjects of his photographs. Barbara Summers edited the photographs and interviews for the book which was published in conjunction with an exhibit by the same name at the Corcoran Gallery of Art http://www.corcoran.org/ a cool site to visit. Summers writes about her reactions to the material: "Love was not hard to find in their words, either. It seemed to be a key to their sucess. A truly beautifying discovery for me was to find so much love in anger. It was a fist-up, death-defying love that challenged the unfair conditions of life and muscled in on injustice as it nursed both sides of a nation." On TV and movies fight scenes often have the guys battling it out with cuts to women with hands to their cheeks with an "oh my" expressions on their faces. That's always seemed so false and unbelievable to me, certainly not the way any of the women I know would behave in such situations. That "fist-up, death-defying love" is so much the opposite of a certain feminine stereotype. It rings so true. But then came the challenge to pick which woman to write about. The picture is of Jean Blackwell Hutson. Hutson became the curator for the Schomburg collection in 1948 and worked as chief until her retirement in 1980. One good reason to choose her first is because of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The institution is truly a world treasure and provides great resources online http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html a good link to begin with, but note that they have other portals to aid in location of matterials in the collection http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/ead/scm Auturo Alfonso Shomburg is certainly worth a post too, for now here's the link to the Wikipedia article on him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Alfonso_Schomburg The University of Michigan hosts a cool Web page depeicting an exhibition about Harlem the Schomburg Center mounted a few years back and it gives a little hint of the value of the collection--well is worth looking at just for fun--http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/ Hutson got a telegram in 1936 to fill in for the librarian of the Schomburg Collection who was on maternity leave. After she left the Schomburg collection she got sent around to various NY Public LIbrary locations as a "guinea pig" to see how library patrons would react to a black librarian. Hutson concludes that people "didn't care that much." Perhaps if there hadn't been a Jean Blackwell Hutson another librarian would have done the workman like job of cataloging the collection to be available to the public: perhaps. There's no question about Hutson's dedication, and it made all the difference. She points out: "One of the main things the Schomburg does is supply the ammunition for change. It is a part of the public library, open to everybody, everywhere. You don't have to be registered at the university to have access to the matereials. You don't have to pay an admission fee to come in, and the catalogue is available all around the world." It's not surprising that librarians are at the forefront of protecting the rights of ordinary people against government intrusion in this post 9-11 world. If only we paid more attention to librarians! In 1964-65 Hutson went to work at the Africana collection at the University of Ghana. There are a couple of memorable remarks about that. First she said: "I remember feeling ashamed of being fifty years old, an old lady. But being in Africa meant that I was respected and sought after. I was really surprised how at home I felt and liberated. And then I realized that it was my first experience being accepted as a person without regard to race." The second important thing is that the collection at the University of Ghana was limited to people who lived and stayed on the African contienent. She convinced the administrators that black people abroad were part of Africans "still making our contributions." She said: "I was proud that I left that collection with historical and geographical boundaries greatly extended." Jean Blackwell Hutson made extraordinary contributions to the whole field of Black and Africana Studies. She enriched the cultural landscape of the United States, but few will ever know her name.

Benjamin Banneker

johnpowers — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 04:13:02 GMT

Only a few posts into this Black History Month thing, but the downsides and upsides are becoming clearer. I keep getting drawn into biographies. That's not really bad, but history is more than great men and military victories. Although, the history of history, is full of great men and battles won--history as a way to undo the memory of those on the loosing end. America history demands context for understanding and I'm no where near knowlegeable enough for that. So while reading biographies I'm left musing. I still plan to write about Bayard Rustin, probably A. Philp Randolph and really feel the need to learn more about black women. But yesterday's post had John Conyers about creating a Department of Peace www.peacedepartment.net tracing the idea to Benjamin Banneker. So I was curious about Benjamin Banneker. I didn't really find reference to his proposal for a Peace Department in what I read. What I did find were a whole bunch of Web sites about Benjamin Banneker which seem intended for school children. That's about my speed as far as reading goes--short and sweet. These sites make it seem like stealing to provide a short summary of Banneker's biography, so I'll just give a couple of links http://www.osv.org/kids/articles14.htm and http://www.newton.mec.edu/bigelow/classroom/yerardi/blackhistory05/section4/samueln/04blackhist05sn.htm are probably as good as any. Banneker was a free Black man and tobacco farmer. Banneker was born a freeman because his mother was free and his African father had purchased his freedom. His father made a series of dams and channels to irrigate the property, so they always made a good crop. When Benjamin Banneker was in his early 20's constructed a wooden clock which is credited with being the first wooden clock made in America. In his fifties he became friends with a neighbor George Ellicott who lent him some books and equipment that Banneker used to teach himself astronomy. From 1792--1797 Banneker wrote and published a very accurate almanac. George Ellicott's cousin Andrew was commissioned to survey the Federal Lands which became Washington D.C. Banneker assisted Andrew Ellicott in that survey. All of that lays pretty flat on the page. It's no wonder that Banneker's clock made him famous locally. What jumps out, of course is that Benjamin Banneker was really smart. Everyone has their own gifts, but talent is truly rare and it's pretty obvious. The friendship with George Ellicott is intriquing to me. Both men were fully adults when they met, and Ellicott about 20 years Banneker's junior. I wonder what their friendship was like? For a short time as a youth Banneker attended a Quaker school and the Ellicott's were Quakers. I saw no mention of Banneker being a Quaker and it does seem their bond was through mutual interest in mathematics and science. In the story of Denmark Vesey one of the things that is reported is that before Vesey purchased his freedom he was a slave to a ship Captain named Joseph Vesey. "[T]estimony at Demark Vesey's trial recalled how Captain Vesey and the other officers had noticed the beauty and intelligence of the fourteen-year-old slave, and how the captain had approved bringign the boy above decks, allowing him into the officer's cabin, and providing him with finer clothes." Raising this sounds like I'm bringing to light my dirty mind, maybe it's a little of that, but really want to make a different observation. In a Noam Chomsky piece on Haiti http://www.africaspeaks.com/haiti/ he remarks about an anecdote about FDR. The point of Chomsky's telling is "The element of racism in policy formation should not be discounted, to the present day." But here's the FDR story: "On a visit to occupied Haiti in 1917, he recorded in his diary a comment by his travelling companion, who later became the Occupation's leading civilian official. Fascinated by the Haitian Minister of Agriculture, he "couldn't help saying to myself," he told FDR, "that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes." "Roosevelt appears to have relished the story," Schmidt notes, 'and retold it to American Minister Norman Armour when he visited Haiti as President in 1934.'" It's weird when people make objects of other people. In life it's the relationships with people that count and slavery is a truly strange relationship. Notions of white supremacy emerged within slavery in the American context. FDR's remembering a comment about the beauty of a black man ("for stud purposes") seventeen years after the initial quip seems so odd. My take on it is cognitive dissonance: he held a belief in the inferiority of black people and yet with his own eyes recognized a superior human being. Something similar happened with Captain Vesey and the young Telemaque (Denmark Vesey). I don't have much to go on, but going back to the friendship between Benneker and Ellicott, it seems quite evident they were good friends. Surely Ellicott recognized Benneker's talent and intelligence and a mutuality in interests. In Benneker's almanacs it's clear that Benneker was an abolitionist. I couldn't find enough about the Ellicotts to determine if they were abolitionists too. Banneker wrote a famous letter to Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson was Secretary of State. The whole letter is worth reading http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbanneker4.htm but here is a great paragraph from it: "I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us ; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath given being to us all ; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties ; and that however variable we may be in society or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him." Banneker may not have heard a whiff of gossip about Jefferson's Sally Hemming. Nevertheless Jefferson surely must have thought of Sally Hemming when he read Banneker's letter. I suppose I'm naive, but I can't see how Jefferson could have fathered four children by Sally Hemming and not in some way been madly in love with her. Well, 'madly" is choosen with multiple meanings in mind. Jefferson's relationship with Hemming must have been complicated. Banneker knew Jefferson's ideals were in conflict with his slave holding and called for him to embrace the better angels of his nature. Banneker's letter to Jefferson makes me think he wasn't obsequious in the least towards Ellicott. In his letter to Jefferson he wrote, "Sir, I freely and cheerfully acknowledge, that I am of the African race, and in that color which is natural to them of the deepest dye" He wrote Jefferson what James Brown sang some one hundred and seventy years latter: "Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud." Sometimes racism seems a disease with no cure making feel sad and discouraged. Banneker's life is worth celebrating. I may well be making unwarranted assumptions about the freindship between Banneker and Ellicott, but the idea that they were both industrious men of humble beginnings who shared a love for learning and therefore a friendship is a reassuring notion.

Those Dirty Bastards

johnpowers — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:14:36 GMT

The point of doing posts during Black History Month is to do a little bit of research I might not otherwise do. So I have to come up with an idea. Tonight I had an idea, I was going to blog about Bayard Rustin: Tomorrow, maybe. I was going over pages about Rustin and also pages about A. Philip Randolph. They were such remarkable people. It seemed they had not only a capacity to dream a better world, but also a clarity about who was standing in the way. Vice president Cheney is in the news for having shot a guy. I was paying attention to the story and got kind of intersted in the Armstrong family. Texas politics has such a soap opera qualty about it. So I began surfing around for information about some other Texans my gut tells me played a role against the Civil Rights Movement. LOL I started searching Nelson Hunt . When I was a kid the radio stations played commentaries by Nelson (Bunker) Hunt's father H. L. Hunt. Now the Hunt family story really is a soap opera; H.L. was a bigamist twice--I think that's right three families anyway. Oh and then from the links looking at the John Birch Society and the Koch family. It all begins to blow my mind because whenever I go down that route: lets call it the yellow brick road of Fascism, the conspiracies get so muddled. I wonder if those rich pricks see a site that says "oh she's a witch" and then have some completly off the wall and utterly pretend group put up a page that says "oh she's a witch" with the whole thing seeming so incredible that it cancels out the first negative page. I don't know how it works. But it does seem when researching the really rich, especially the ones who spend big bucks on far right causes, it's hard to know what to make of it all because of the all the wacky conspiracy stuff up. Who really knows what they do, but it seems clear lots of those rich folks in Texas are up to no good and they're damned clever about it. Okay so then I figured I'd try to find some more generally acceptable links to the right wing groups on their crusades and checked the Southern Poverty Law Center. LOL well controversy there too . Wikipedia has a red stop sign up on their article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Poverty_Law_Center I like that, often it seems the dialog about controversial articles is reavealing. Don't quite know what to make of it all, although I notice that David Horowitz is the source of much of the contention. This morning in the Post-Gazette, my local newspaper there was an editorial about a corruption scandal in Kenya. I was really happy to see the local newspaper pay attention to the story, although I would have preferred a straight news article about it. But I'm sore about all the corruption in the U.S. Government and went gathering links--I'm prone to futile exercises and poor judgement. One thing I learned that I didn't know was that Jack Abramoff got some of his seed money to start his political influence rackett from the South African apartheid government secret propaganda arm. I knew he made a film in the 1990's called "Red Scorpion" but not that it was paid for by the South Africans. Weird, lots o' Fascist there and of course with connections to Fascist here and (cough) especially in Texas. I'm not saying there's any connection, but I seem to remember that that guy who got labled "a person of interest" in the anthrax matter, Steven Hatfill had all sorts of South african connections http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49717-2003Sep9?language=printer I have know idea. Maybe he's innocent as he claims: the whole thing seems bungled. Still Dick Cheney's "Fuck you" to Senator Lehey seemed out of bounds and thought it had an extra punch since Lehey was one of the targets of those anthrax attacks. Blah! What's so moving about both Bayard and Randolph is they seemed clear on the fact that they could be murdered by Fascists, but it would be unseemly to murder all black Americans, so they were brave and led a movement. I got way off topic, sorry I'm ranting. At some of those sites I've been surfing I found some encouragement. First is the picture: Hey that's John Conyers, quite a good guy in his own right. What's that? A Department of Peace!!!! Yeah man. Also this from the http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/OL070391.html an interview of Oren Lyons by Bill Moyers. These words struck a chord: "We can't afford, now, to have these national borders. We can't afford to have racism. We can't afford apartheid. We cannot -- it's one of those luxuries that we can't have anymore as human beings. We've got to think now, in real terms, for that seventh generation. And we've got to move in concert. We've got to sing the same song. We've got to have the same ceremony. We've got to get back to spiritual law if we are to survive."

Denmark Vesey

johnpowers — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:56:51 GMT

The picture was scanned from the cover of "Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led it" by David Robertson http://tinyurl.com/agcxh It's a little flip that the image is on the cover. as the fact that nobody knows what Vesey looked like is something significant for Robertson. Robertson begin's the story: "No one thought to describe his face." Vesey is an important figure in American history, but how many know even his name? Many do in Charleston, South Carolina. Roberson notes that in 1976 the city of Charleston commissioned a portrait of Vesey to be hung in the new municipal auditorium. And Roberston quotes a white columnist for the "Charleston News and Courier" when the project became known: "they could not have found a local black whose portrait would have been more offensive to many white people." The artist was confounded by the lack of a likeness and painted Vesey addressing his followers with his back to the viewer. The painting was stolen shortly after it's dedication, but later returned. Robertson notes: "[T]he desire to subordinate--or to obliterate--the historical memory of Denmark Vesey in Charelston was always just below the surface." Denmark Vesey is remembered as organizining an elaborately planned slave insurrection in 1822. The historical facts of the matter are not entirely agreed upon by historical scholars. Some would have it that Vesey and others were hanged in a pique of hysteria, part of a political calculation and pretense to tighten the screws of the police state which enforced the insititution of slavery. David Robertson concludes that Vesey's insurrection was well-planned and nearly succeeded. I don't know enough about history to weigh in on that argument. Nevertheless I enjoyed Robertson's book and think it important regardless of the controversy about the extent of Vesey's plan and operation. Robertson seems convincing in his interpretation. He also provides a telling context for understanding the life Vesey and the lives of black people in America at that time. He points out that in the first U.S. census in 1790: "the Charleston District reported a population of 15,402 whites and 51,585 black slaves.." "The 8 to 9 percent of the white population that controlled Charleston's wealth and political power created a police apparatus that would have made their Barbadian ancestors proud." Robertson traces the beginnings of Vesey's plot to 1818. The plan was to seize control of Charleston and to set Charleston on fire, kill as many as they could and loot as much as the could. It would be important to commander as many ships in Charleston's harbor as they could so they could flee to Santo Domingo. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060214/ts_afp/haitivote Haiti election count is in the news today. While Rene Preval has nearly a 40 percentage point lead over his nearest rival with most of the votes counted, it appears that he may fall just shy of the fifty percent necessary to avoid a run-off election next year. Preval is claiming widespread voiting fraud. More violence in Haiti makes me shudder and profoundly sad. Too few Americans appreciate how connected our history is with Haiti. The French were so rattled by the successful rebellion of Tousaint L' Overture that they ceded the Louisiana Territory to the U.S. And the history of U.S. involvement with Haiti is mostly a sordid affair ever since. http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20040106T190000-0500_53987_OBS__IMAGINE__NIGGERS_SPEAKING_FRENCH____.asp and here for more http://www.africaspeaks.com/haiti/ Like many Americans I want to live in the "better tomorrow" a generation before me worked so hard to produce. I want to live to make a brighter day. Some "forgiving and forgetting" is probably desirable, but hardly wholesale forgetting. We would do well to remember the past to understand our present. The story of Denmark Vesey is one to remember.

Pittsburgh Courier

johnpowers — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 03:28:23 GMT

In 2001 the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh http://www.warhol.org/ exhibited "Without Sanctuary" a collection of lynchings postcards. The book is "Without Sanctuary" by HIlton Als, et. al http://tinyurl.com/ajmr9 I had read the review of the exhibit in "The New Yorker" and even seen a reproduction of one of the post cards in the magazine. So I was unprepared for the impact the overwhelming impact of the physical exhibition. I entered the room and looked at one postcards, proceeded to the next and then realised the whole room was full of one gruesume image after another and felt sick. I quickly exited the room. Across the hall in a separate room the museum had assembled tables and chairs and left journal books on the tables for people to write about the exhibit. Along the walls of the room were enlarge reproductions of newspaper articles about lynching. There were a few articles from the Post-Gazette, but most of the articles were from editons of The Pittsburgh Courier. The Courier was one of the most important black newspapers in the United States. Robert L. Vann http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/2000/Media/Kyle%27s%20stuff/Robert%20Vann.htm was the long-time editor taking the helm as editor in 1910, a time when the apartheid regime of Jim Crow was fortified by terroristic lynchings and the rise in Klan activities thourghout the American South. Vann created a company to solicit national ad sales for The Pittsburgh Courier and was successful in convincing other black newspapers to use his service. Black newspapers were essentially banned from sale in the South, so distribution was an enormous obstcle to national sales. Vann worked out an arrangement with Pullman Porters to distribute the newspapers. http://www.post-gazette.com/lifestyle/20020224pullmanside0224fnP3.asp Unmarked vehicles would deliver the bundles of newspapers, wrapped in sturdy paper to protect them from the weather because the porters often had to hide them, and the porters personally handed the bundles off. Often ministers would distribute the papers to paperboys at Sunday services. At the height of circulation the Pittsburgh Courier distributed nearly 400,000 copies of their weekly national run. The part of filmaker Ken Burns' PBS series dealing with the Negro League didn't tell the story of Pittsburgh's two legendary Negro League teams, the Pittsburgh Crawford's and the Homestead Greys, quite the way the story is told here, but helps to explain why the city managed to support two teams. A good deal can be credited to the influence of The Pittsburgh Courier in the South. After regular season the Negro League teams toured the South playing against local teams. Baseball was truly "America's pastime." The widespread distribution of the Courier assured name recognition across South for the two baseball franchises. Robert L. Vann had the ear of president FDR and was a champion for racial equality and against the violence at the foundation of Jim Crow. The paper did hard reporting about lynchings, using stringers to document the facts about them. The paper also vigorously editorialized against lynching. Vann died in 1940 but The Pittsburgh Courier continued along the path he had struck of solid reporting and advocacy. During World War II the Courier was the only black newspaper to have an accredited war reporter in the war zone. The paper demanded segregation in the U.S. armed forces end. In 1966 The Pittsburgh Courier was sold to John Sengstake and is still published today by Real Times, the largest Black newspaper chain in the country http://www.newpittsburghcourier.com/

A Special Rage

johnpowers — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 21:46:41 GMT

The photo is of a writer named Gilbert Moore. Biography seems to be one of the main ways that people try to accommodate the occasion of Black History Month. I think there's something very good about that. Clearly there are and have been people who have done amazing things whose lives are worth celebrating. But what's the measure? And what's the best way to access history, especially when there are so many tributaries to it? One of the disputes about whether or not Black History Month is a worthwhile idea at all, it seems, has to do with what the main stream is, and whether or not the main stream; or perhaps the winning side of history, is what the study of history really should be. We're in the habit of thinking in terms of winners and loosers. But life as we know it is rather more complicated than that. I thought about Gilbert Moore because of a book he wrote about the Black Panther Party back in the seventies. Sad to say, I don't think I actually completed the book, and I gave it away to a very earnest young woman who had involved herself in the New Black Panther Party. The book was first published as "A Special Rage" and the Harper paperback reissue as simply "Rage." It's out of print, but copies are available from sources like ABE http://www.abebooks.com/ Moore's telling the sotry of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers is really aware and nuanced. He was sent to cover the trial for "Life" magazine. But what was particularly interesting to me was the story Morre tells about himself. He explains how this assignment changed his course, afterwards he quit his job for mainstream media, reasoning that there must be a better course to follow. I'm not remembering the book so well, and I don't know much about what Moore's done since. The mentions on the Internet I found were from this page http://www.reportingcivilrights.org/ Reporting Civil Rights which is a very cool page to look at to see a rather long list of reporters who brought the news to the attention of the nation. Very interesting to see the names and to reflect on what they'eve done since. Here's the link to the brief biography of Gilbert Moore http://www.reportingcivilrights.org/authors/bio.jsp?authorId=136 Since I didn't have much to say about Moore, because I don't know much, I thought to write about someone else. Gordon Parks isn't a bad choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks What an accomplished person! Certainly the life and accomplishment of Parks is worth celebrating. There seemed something really important in Moore's book that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Well, of course it's a book worth reading, but something more. Then today via a really wonderful blog called 3 Quarks Daily http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/ I was alerted to an interview of David Scott by Stuart Hall http://www.bombsite.com/scott/scott2.html I'd heard of Stuart Hall, probably the most canonized of the founders of Cultural Studies. LOL something engaging in discussions here at Tribe is how frustrating I am to younger intellectuals here because I'm so ignorant of Cultural Studies, Theory, and Post Modernism. In any case David Scott wrote a book, "Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment" published early last year. Here's a link to a brief cover of the book http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0822334445 From that page: "Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James's masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James's recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James's thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt's in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to distill from it a politics for a possible future." I haven't read the book, but something in that points to what I find so important about Gilbert Moore's "Rage." It has to do with the way the past is concieved. The story Moore was assigned to tell about the trial of Huey Newton in one way or another was through the lens of vindication. Surely his editors at "Life" were interested in the vindication of law and order. And maybe Moore had some impulse to write about Huey as a hero, or to vindicate the Panthers in some way or another. But--oh lord and I maybe so wrong about this--Moore found that romanticising the story in either direction was to get the story of the Black Panthers and the trial of Huey Newton wrong. He was too good a journalist for that. He couldn't produce the story for "Life" in the way the magazine needed it to be told. So he wrote a book where the essential tragedy could be told. Again from the link about Scott's book: In tragedy, the future does not appear as part of a seamless forward movement, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Yeah, part of the problem of remembering Black History is fitting it into a story of the steady forward movement of the mainstream: A black man invented traffic lights and narratives like that. On the other hand, there is a real opportunity in Black History Month for going up the muddy tributaries and exploring the little explored recesses of our past. From the comments to my last post Potash writes about Satyagraha. The English rendition I like the most of satyagraha is "soul power." The soul embraces the contraries--the ups and downs. "The struggle is my life." That's not just true for Mandela, but as true for everyone of us. Of course we must resist, of course we must seek liberation, but for us all it is sturggle. Farmer had soul power. From http://www.interchange.org/jfarmer.html As the turbulent decade of the 1960's unfolded, some blacks who despaired that they would ever have an amicable relationship with the white majority and regarded nonviolence as more of a weakness than a strength, on occasion would ask Farmer, "When are you going to fight back?" Farmer would always reply, "We are fighting back, we're only using new weapons." Non-violence is not weakness, nor is it pacisfism in Farmer's construction; it is a weapon in the struggle for justice. Just one weapon, but perhaps something of what makes it mighty is that it allows us, when we embrace non violence, to transcend the habit of making meaning history in romantic terms of vindication; instead forcing us to see the tragedy, the struggle of ups and downs in the flow of human experience. Embracing non violent struggle isn't to invite conflict but to invite amellioration of troubles: progress in fits and starts. Gilbert Moore found Huey Newton neither hero nor villian. What's so intersting about the book "Rage" is that Moore came face to face with the limitations of viewing the past in romantic visions. So now I'm really curious about what's happend in Gilbert Moore's life. Does anyone know?

Gandhi Who?

johnpowers — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:21:40 GMT

It's a bit reassuring to think that hardly anyone will see these posts. There's got to be something jarring about an ignorant white guy's take on Black History Month. Still the motivation is to try for a little while to become not quite so ignorant. An old interview with the mucisian Taj Mahal came to mind where he talked about how he got his name. I couldn't find that interview, but the story was that Taj Mahal's father admired Gandhi and named him Taj in an Indian frame of mind. I've probably botched the story. But Taj Mahal is a wonderful storyteller and has been generous about giving interviews. Here are a couple: http://www.coraconnection.com/pages/taj_profile.html and especially http://www.puremusic.com/taj2.html I remember hearing some Jazz songs with Gandhi at the center; one of the singers has some sort of royal title, but I can't for the life of me think what it is. Here's the Wikipedia on Jazz Royalty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_royalty What intriques me is obviously the ideas of Gandhi were part of the cultural currency before Martin Luther King, Jr. Okay, the idea of civil disobedience was written about by Thoreau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau but there's always been a question in my mind where this whole philosophy of nonviolence for social justice came from. As a baby boomer, it seemed something outside the American traditon of violence in service to one cause or another. Gandhi's tactics were important to the movement here in the USA as this interesting essay by Richard G. Fox, "How Westerners Rewrote Gandhi's Message" reveals http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1998-01/gandhi.html It's from that essay I learned about James L. Farmer, he's the guy in the picture. Farmer was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1998 http://www.medaloffreedom.com/JamesFarmer.htm >[T]he Medal of Freedom is designed for persons the president deems to have made especially meritorious contributions to the security of national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public and private endeavors.< Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. CORE organized The Freedom Riders: "On one tense occasion in the early 1960's, after a particularly vicious spate of violence, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy suggested that Farmer's followers postpone some of their "freedom rides" -- designed to desegregate the interstate bus system in the South -- so that everyone could "cool off." Farmer refused, saying, "We have been cooling off for 350 years." Farmer's died in July 1999. It takes a month of February to remember the contributions of black people to human civilization. I hope I'll remember James Farmer's name in July, in November, and all year long. Farmer wrote: Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civl Rights Movement http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875651887/sr=8-1/qid=1139535040/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6934006-6669561?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Black History Month

johnpowers — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:46:35 GMT

A friend started blogging this month by doing a post every day in re Black History Month. I'm really enjoying his posts. Something about doing a blog post is that it shapes a bit of research and I wonder what it would be like to try to do the same for the month. I'm so lazy! My first thought was to do a post about King Pleasure, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Pleasure but I couldn't find any rreally good pictures. Pleasure hit the charts in 1952 with "Moody's Moods" with Pleasure singing vocalese http://www.ralf.org/~colomon/vocalese/vocalese.html that is vocal lines following the melody lines of an instrumental work. King Pleasure cited Eddie Jefferson as an influence, but it seems like everyone credits Jefferson with "Moody's Moods" except King Pleasure. They're both passed now, Jefferson in 1979, shot outside a club in Detroit and King Pleasure in 1982 in LA. Here's what Yahoo Music has to say about Jefferson: The founder of vocalese (putting recorded solos to words), Eddie Jefferson did not have a great voice, but he was one of the top jazz singers, getting the maximum out of what he had. He started out working as a tap dancer, but by the late '40s was singing and writing lyrics. A live session from 1949 (released on Spotlite) finds him pioneering vocalese by singing his lyrics to "Parker's Mood" and Lester Young's solo on "I Cover the Waterfront." However, his classic lyrics to "Moody's Mood for Love" were recorded first by King Pleasure (1952), who also had a big hit with his version of "Parker's Mood." Jefferson had his first studio recording that year (which included Coleman Hawkins' solo on "Body and Soul"), before working with James Moody (1953-1957). Although he recorded on an occasional basis in the 1950s and '60s, his contributions to the idiom seemed to be mostly overlooked until the 1970s. Jefferson worked with Moody again (1968-1973), and during his last few years often performed with Richie Cole. He was shot to death outside of a Detroit club in 1979. Eddie Jefferson, who also wrote memorable lyrics to "Jeannine," "Lady Be Good," "So What," "Freedom Jazz Dance," and even "Bitches' Brew," recorded for Savoy, Prestige, a single for Checker, Inner City, and Muse; his final sides appeared in 1999 under the title Vocal Ease. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide Written by Scott Yanow I hadn't known before that Eddie Jefferson was from Pittsburgh, that's where I live. There's a short interview at http://www.gallery41.com/JazzArtists/EddieJefferson.htm Once you listen to that surf around the site a bit. The photos are way expensive, but the site is really priceless. Here's Amazon's page on Vocalese http://www.gallery41.com/JazzArtists/EddieJefferson.htm And the photo of Jefferson comes from this site http://www.ozsons.com/Vocalese.htm How come so many sites about Jazz are in other languages than English? I guess prophets are never honored in their own land.

Appropriate Technology

johnpowers — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 02:59:53 GMT

My computer monitor screen now has two bars of violet and green on either side. It happened yesterday when thunder sounded and the little voice in my head said to turn off the computer. Just as I was processing that a loud crack of thunder shook the room and I turned to see the monitor screen: drat! My father popped his head through the door to see if I was okay. It took out the phone message machine and the upper VHS stations of the TV: double drat! We here in America aren't accustomed to considering the fragility of services we take for granted. Yes these electronic devices in my house were connected to power surge strips. We're not really prepared to be without electricity here for any length of time. This little mishap is only a slight reminder, but the aftermath of hurricane Katrina along the American Gulf is a more sobering one. Development in the world's poorer countries is challenging and interesting. Discussions are often contentious. Many disparage small projects, saying they're just a drop in the bucket. It's a fair point, yet the needs are so pressing now that inexpensive small projects seem worth doing. My friend Nathan wrote in his blog http://apcala.com/nathan/weblog/ > I read that ICT has the wonderful capacity to empower an individual person, even the >poorest. But how can one eliminate poverty through the use of ICT in Uganda? Recently I saw two very significant Web sites dealing with uses for solar energy. The first SODIS http://www.sodis.ch/ is a technique for providing safe drinking water and is simplicity itself. Water in clear plastic drinking bottles exposed to heat and UV radiation from the sun kills water borne pathogens. There are some important details, but essentially it's as simple as that. SODIS is an example of information which widely spread will save lives and improve standards of living. But spreading the word to areas without electricity or telephone, much less Internet access is difficult. The second important Web site describes the important work of INVENEO http://www.inveneo.org/ to connect villages to telephone. Brilliant! Like SODIS the idea is really simple, but carefully researched to address real world problems. So for example the system is powered by solar cells, but can also be powered by pedal power on cloudy days http://www.inveneo.org/?q=pedalnetwork Also the computers are designed with few moving parts to make them more robust. Most of all the entire system is realistically cost. Mobile phone technology has greatly increased the spread of telephony to previously isolated areas. Innovative solutions like INVENEO's village telephones systems can further speed communications allowing people to get information they can use, like SODIS, and importantly allowing the rest of us to hear their voices. All of us have something to offer. Information and communications technologies make it possible for many to communicate to many. Nathan's question is no rhetorical lament, but rather calls for a response. The intelligence, creativity, and the dedication of the many using new information and communications technologies can help people all over the world to rise up out of poverty. And we all can play a part in this. People in more developed countries can also benefit by turning their attentions in this direction. Many of us have become disconnected from the processes which provide us with the necessities of life. Hurricane Katrina reminds us of how fragile our systems actually are. Communications were destroyed and greatly complicated the response to the emergency. INVECO's inexpensive system for telephony might have come in handy in New Orleans. In any case the redundancy built into the design is something that even here in the West should pay heed. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/inveneo_solar_a.php