“Call Billy.”
He hated the way Dan thought he was boss just because he was driving the Civic, but they agreed he was the most talented at speeding and not getting a ticket. So Eddie let him drive his own car like on Hawaii Five-O.
“Billy, we’re on the way to the library for the Black History project. Do you still want to meet? If you’re not there I guess we can tell Ole Suspension that you were -- “
“No way. He’s pulling his load. We’re not gonna lie for him.”
“Okay, Dan says we’re not gonna lie for you. You have to pull your load, so I guess you gotta be there.”
“What’d he say?”
“I just got his voice mail.”
“There’s that old man again waiting for the bus in the cold.”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right that an old man would have to wait for the bus like that everyday.”
“Yeah, well, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“We could give him a ride.”
“He shouldn't be taking rides from strangers.”
“What date did Ole Suspension assign us?”
“Just a year -- 1934.”
“So we’re supposed to just roll through the microfilm until we find something?”
“Hey, dudes.”
“We didn’t think you were coming.”
“I’ll pull my load. Don’t worry. And I know you would snitch on me if I didn’t show up. What year we got?”
“1934."
"My sister had that year. Go to -- let’s see -- go to July.”
“July -- what happened then?”
“A lynching.”
“In our town?”
“In every town back then. Stop there.”
“Gross!”
“Is that for real?”
“In our town?”
“In our town. What are you doing, man? You don’t need to look at it that close.”
“I’m just looking at the faces. I wanna see if my grandpa is there.”
“Hey, that’s the old man at the bus stop.”
“What -- you’re crazy. Okay, maybe it is.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“It is him.”
“What are you dudes talking about?”
“There’s this old man who waits for the bus everyday at Sievewright and Grant. That’s him right there. He’s younger. But that’s him.”
“Let’s give him a ride.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Let’s give him a ride.”
“You going, Billy?”
“This is crazy…but I’ll pull my load.”
“He’s still there.”
“With out bus service, of course. You ask. Don’t screw this up.”
“Excuse me, Sir, but we see how it’s so cold out here. Would you like a ride?”
“A ride. You’re offering me a ride?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Well, I don’t mind if I do.”
“You get in back, Eddie. Let him in the front.”
“I really appreciate this, boys. I’m just going five blocks, to Edison by the mall, but walking that far is tough on my legs at my age. I have to take the bus.”
“So how long have you lived in this town, Sir?”
“Oh, just a year. The son of an old friend of mine got a job down here about five years ago and he said the living expenses are a lot lower than in Michigan.”
“So that’s where you’re from?”
“Yeah, worked at a GM plant. Now I’m retired.”
“We’re you ever down here in 1934?”
“1934? I wasn’t even born then. I was born in 1940. Why?”
“I don’t know. That was a tough year for us here.”
“I bet it was. It was for everyone. My mom and dad told me all about that. But we pulled through. And now we got a great country.”
“We do, Sir. Well, here’s Edison, Sir. Can we take you to directly to where you’re going?”
“Oh, I’m going to pop into the Walgreens at the mall here. This is fine. I’m mighty obliged to you boys.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Now you have a nice day.”
“You too, Sir.”
“What do you think we would have done to him if he said he had lived here in 1934?”
“I guess we we’ll never know.”
Monday, February 27, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
1941
Began with an ending
Ended with a beginning
And supposing he had
Toughed out that year
In what they called
A sanitarium back then
Would the menace
of the Axis
Haved saved him
From his own hand
Ended with a beginning
And supposing he had
Toughed out that year
In what they called
A sanitarium back then
Would the menace
of the Axis
Haved saved him
From his own hand
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Thursday, October 6, 2011
What do Condoleezza Rice and Angela Davis have in common?
Both knew the four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. The girls killed in the bombing were Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14. Twenty-two others were injured.
In an interview I saw between Condoleezza Rice and Tim Russert, she said that she was friends with the four girls killed in the bombing. I entered Condoleezza Rice and Tim Russert into the YouTube search window but couldn't find the interview. Condoleezza Rice, born on November 14, 1954, would have been eight at the time of the bombing.
Recenlty on Democracy Now! I saw an interview with Angela Davis in a film now being shown at the Sundance festival called The Black Power Mixtape. Of the four girls, Angela Davis said she lived next door to one of them and she was a friend of the sister of another. Angela Davis, born on January 26, 1944, would have been 19 at the time of the bombing.
Here is the interview with Angela Davis and confirmation from Amy Goodman that Condoleezza Rice also knew the girls. Ms. Goodman said that Rice was friends with Denise McNair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJi_yBYgS3g
Interesting that two people would emerge from the same turmoil with directly opposite ideologies.
In an interview I saw between Condoleezza Rice and Tim Russert, she said that she was friends with the four girls killed in the bombing. I entered Condoleezza Rice and Tim Russert into the YouTube search window but couldn't find the interview. Condoleezza Rice, born on November 14, 1954, would have been eight at the time of the bombing.
Recenlty on Democracy Now! I saw an interview with Angela Davis in a film now being shown at the Sundance festival called The Black Power Mixtape. Of the four girls, Angela Davis said she lived next door to one of them and she was a friend of the sister of another. Angela Davis, born on January 26, 1944, would have been 19 at the time of the bombing.
Here is the interview with Angela Davis and confirmation from Amy Goodman that Condoleezza Rice also knew the girls. Ms. Goodman said that Rice was friends with Denise McNair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJi_yBYgS3g
Interesting that two people would emerge from the same turmoil with directly opposite ideologies.
Who was the woman who stabbed Martin Luther King?
I didn't know until just now that April 4, 1968, was not the only day of a violent attack against Martin Luther King. He also suffered brutality ten years earlier. At Blumstein's Department Store in Harlem on Saturday, September 20, 1958, a 42-year-old unemployed black woman named Izola Ware Curry approached Martin Luther King while he was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom. She said to him, "Are you Martin Luther King?" Other reports state that she said to Dr. King, "Is this Martin Luther King?" After Dr. King replied that he was, Mrs. Ware Curry said to him, "I've been looking for you for five years," and then stabbed him in the chest with a Japanese letter opener with a razor-sharp, curved blade and an inlaid ivory handle, barely missing his aorta. Doctors told King that if he had sneezed or coughed at the time she plunged the knife in, his aorta would have been severed and he would have drowned in his own blood. Because the razor-sharp tip of the instrument did touch but did not cut Dr. King's aorta, his chest had to be opened to extract the would-be lethal weapon.
King recovered of course and went on to lead the struggle for civil rights, a role that ended at the Lorraine Hotel in Atlanta at 6:01 pm EST on Thursday, April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray aimed a 30.06 rifle and slew the dreamer.
We can understand why a white man like Ray would want to hurt Martin Luther King. He was an effective leader in ending the privileges the white race enjoyed at the expense of black people. But why would a black woman hold a grievance against King?
Izola Ware Curry was born in the sawmill town of Adrian, Georgia, in 1916 and immigrated to New York from Savannah, Georgia, in 1936 -- when she was 20 years old -- after divorcing her husband, James Curry. She ended up at Harlem, more specifically at 121 W. 122nd Street, one of her many addresses in New York. Mrs. Ware Curry is one individual among the many grandchildren and children of freed slaves who migrated from the segregated Jim Crow south to the relatively greater freedom of the North and West. That movement is depicted in The Warmth of Other Suns.
After arriving in New York, Curry began working as a housekeeper and cook, and sadly, she also began to trouble herself with delusions that she was being persecuted by the NAACP. After twenty years of suffering through such torment, she focused on Martin Luther King and acted out by stabbing him. Adding to her troubles at the time was her inability to find work in 1958. After her arrest, she told police that King and other civil rights leaders had been causing her to lose jobs and keeping her unemployed and that they had been boycotting her and torturing her.
After authorities told her she was charged with felonious assault and possession of a firearm -- a loaded Italian bone-handled pistol was found in her blouse during her arrest (and King was even more lucky that she chose to use a knife-like weapon, which has less lethal force than a gun, to attack him) -- she replied, “I’m charging him as well as he’s charging me…I’m charging him with being mixed up with the Communists."
King later issued this statement: “I am deeply sorry that a deranged woman should have injured herself in seeking to injure me. I can say, in all sincerity, that I bear no bitterness toward her and I have felt no resentment from the sad moment that the experience occurred. I know that we want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society where a disorganized personality need not become a menace to any man."
After the assault, Mrs. Ware Curry was taken to Bellevue hospital and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was never tried for her alleged crime. On October 17, 1958, a grand jury indicted Mrs. Ware Curry for attempted murder, but she was judged incompetent to stand trial.
She was later committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane. What a disturbing and demeaning label to paste on a human being. Surely Mrs. Ware Curry's life and crime illustrates society's ongoing failure to help the criminally insane, the mentally ill, or whatever other term is used for those with troubled minds (there, yet another label).
Somewhat ironically, perhaps, Dr. King's murderer, James Earl Ray, would also survive a knife attack. On June 4, 1981, Ray was stabbed 22 times by three black inmates. He survived the attack and later died in 1998. Ray refused to identify his attackers, but they were nonetheless convicted of the crime and given an extra twenty years.
The Wikipedia entry for Ms. Curry states that it is unknown if she is alive or dead. If she is alive she would be about 95.
King recovered of course and went on to lead the struggle for civil rights, a role that ended at the Lorraine Hotel in Atlanta at 6:01 pm EST on Thursday, April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray aimed a 30.06 rifle and slew the dreamer.
We can understand why a white man like Ray would want to hurt Martin Luther King. He was an effective leader in ending the privileges the white race enjoyed at the expense of black people. But why would a black woman hold a grievance against King?
Izola Ware Curry was born in the sawmill town of Adrian, Georgia, in 1916 and immigrated to New York from Savannah, Georgia, in 1936 -- when she was 20 years old -- after divorcing her husband, James Curry. She ended up at Harlem, more specifically at 121 W. 122nd Street, one of her many addresses in New York. Mrs. Ware Curry is one individual among the many grandchildren and children of freed slaves who migrated from the segregated Jim Crow south to the relatively greater freedom of the North and West. That movement is depicted in The Warmth of Other Suns.
After arriving in New York, Curry began working as a housekeeper and cook, and sadly, she also began to trouble herself with delusions that she was being persecuted by the NAACP. After twenty years of suffering through such torment, she focused on Martin Luther King and acted out by stabbing him. Adding to her troubles at the time was her inability to find work in 1958. After her arrest, she told police that King and other civil rights leaders had been causing her to lose jobs and keeping her unemployed and that they had been boycotting her and torturing her.
After authorities told her she was charged with felonious assault and possession of a firearm -- a loaded Italian bone-handled pistol was found in her blouse during her arrest (and King was even more lucky that she chose to use a knife-like weapon, which has less lethal force than a gun, to attack him) -- she replied, “I’m charging him as well as he’s charging me…I’m charging him with being mixed up with the Communists."
King later issued this statement: “I am deeply sorry that a deranged woman should have injured herself in seeking to injure me. I can say, in all sincerity, that I bear no bitterness toward her and I have felt no resentment from the sad moment that the experience occurred. I know that we want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society where a disorganized personality need not become a menace to any man."
After the assault, Mrs. Ware Curry was taken to Bellevue hospital and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was never tried for her alleged crime. On October 17, 1958, a grand jury indicted Mrs. Ware Curry for attempted murder, but she was judged incompetent to stand trial.
She was later committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane. What a disturbing and demeaning label to paste on a human being. Surely Mrs. Ware Curry's life and crime illustrates society's ongoing failure to help the criminally insane, the mentally ill, or whatever other term is used for those with troubled minds (there, yet another label).
Somewhat ironically, perhaps, Dr. King's murderer, James Earl Ray, would also survive a knife attack. On June 4, 1981, Ray was stabbed 22 times by three black inmates. He survived the attack and later died in 1998. Ray refused to identify his attackers, but they were nonetheless convicted of the crime and given an extra twenty years.
The Wikipedia entry for Ms. Curry states that it is unknown if she is alive or dead. If she is alive she would be about 95.
The Nobility of Childhood Mustered for Discussing the Internet
I've noticed a trend of using children as examples to explain how high-tech developments are changing our world.
When discussing the changes the online world is bringing, commentators will say, "Imagine a child of..."
I first noticed this in 1996 or so when I was reading an essay about the magnitude of the Internet. The writer stated that young children of the mid-90s would grow up to be different from us in ways we couldn't imagine or understand. That's because they would be the first generation to grow up with constant online influence. Now those children are grown up and I guess we can see if the Internet has had the sort of profound changes on them that writer anticipated and perhaps feared. The children that writer was discussing would be in their late teens by now.
In 1999 I again found a commentator namechecking childhood as a touchstone for the changes wrought by the Internet. It was the CEO of some important high-tech company and he said he wished he was eight because then he would live to see all the great changes that would be coming thanks to the Internet and other developments. Sadly, that hypothetical eight year old would not see such wonderful changes. At age 10 he would shudder and perhaps sob at the horror of 911. At age 14 he would watch a major city abandoned to catastrophe and fellow citizens dying and left in the streets to rot. And so on.
Recently I heard this trope used again. This time the discussion was about the death of the paper book. An interviewer said that young kids today will probably never experience reading a book of ink on paper. The only reading they will know will be of the electronic variety. The interviewee, the representative of an independent book store, replied that she didn't care how kids read, just as long as they read. Whether it be through the agency of ink on paper or a lighted screen, a child reading Laura Ingalls Wilder can still join her characters in playing a game with a bat and pig bladder.
When discussing the changes the online world is bringing, commentators will say, "Imagine a child of..."
I first noticed this in 1996 or so when I was reading an essay about the magnitude of the Internet. The writer stated that young children of the mid-90s would grow up to be different from us in ways we couldn't imagine or understand. That's because they would be the first generation to grow up with constant online influence. Now those children are grown up and I guess we can see if the Internet has had the sort of profound changes on them that writer anticipated and perhaps feared. The children that writer was discussing would be in their late teens by now.
In 1999 I again found a commentator namechecking childhood as a touchstone for the changes wrought by the Internet. It was the CEO of some important high-tech company and he said he wished he was eight because then he would live to see all the great changes that would be coming thanks to the Internet and other developments. Sadly, that hypothetical eight year old would not see such wonderful changes. At age 10 he would shudder and perhaps sob at the horror of 911. At age 14 he would watch a major city abandoned to catastrophe and fellow citizens dying and left in the streets to rot. And so on.
Recently I heard this trope used again. This time the discussion was about the death of the paper book. An interviewer said that young kids today will probably never experience reading a book of ink on paper. The only reading they will know will be of the electronic variety. The interviewee, the representative of an independent book store, replied that she didn't care how kids read, just as long as they read. Whether it be through the agency of ink on paper or a lighted screen, a child reading Laura Ingalls Wilder can still join her characters in playing a game with a bat and pig bladder.
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