Tuesday, January 18, 2005
left-overs from yesterday
Yesterday required a change in my normal radio listening habits. As much as I enjoy the wind whispering through the jungle, the 24 hour endlessly variable voices of the woodland critters (the Sandhill cranes are slowly headed back North), I still seem to need people sounds. Didn't matter where one went yesterday, there was seemingly endless paens of praise for Saint MLK or conversely, strident condemnation of same. I spent the first 18 years of my life in the deep, deep rural South with occasional visits to relatives in Northern places like Birmingham, Atlanta, or (gasp!) Virginia. Can't recall any of my aquaintances black or white paying much attention to the Rev. He was just another rabble-rouser of which there were always plenty of be they Carrie Nation types, yellow dog pols, global cooling (yep, the ice age is coming!), John Birchers, the CPUSA, scads of others. Just like it is now. Imminently ignorable. Just like it is now. Surprisingly, the Klan was invisible. I'm sure they were around but in all of my young life I never came across a single instance or person involved.
Had that asshole not shot King, my guess is that he would have wound up with about as much cred as a couple of other "Revs.", Jackson and Sharpton. King, by being a huge proponent of LBJ's "Great Society" did his race the single largest disservice possible. As far as segregation, it was properly made illegal by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Forced integration, i.e., across districts, was resisted by both blacks and whites, integration by location was a fact before I ever started school. I wrote a couple of essays on this subject a number of years ago and rather than spending the time re-writing, I'll dig in the archives and try to find them. Hopefully they got transferred to CD from floppy or tape (mag media has a very short life in the swamp!).
As to folk that should be considered true black heros, two immediately come to mind. We studied them in grammar school and their lives make excellent reading. I re-read Up from Slavery: an autobiography by Booker T. Washington a couple of years ago. That link takes you to the text download on the Project Gutenberg site but if you would like a cleaned up rtf file in 12 point Arial, drop me a note. It's 119 pages and 900 KB. Really worth reading.
The other is George Washington Carver. As an alumnus of Iowa State, he's got a really good site there.
Another interesting read is also available from Project Gutenberg. The Future of the Colored Race in America was written by abolitionist preacher William Aikman in 1862 and is fascinating. I've also got it available as a 29 page, 88 KB rtf for the price of an email.
I've no idea who Nicholas Stix is, but he doesn't seem to hold MLK in high esteem. Hard to find anything to refute anything he wrote but he's certainly not gonna win any awards from Jesse or Al!
'nuff for now.
Had that asshole not shot King, my guess is that he would have wound up with about as much cred as a couple of other "Revs.", Jackson and Sharpton. King, by being a huge proponent of LBJ's "Great Society" did his race the single largest disservice possible. As far as segregation, it was properly made illegal by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Forced integration, i.e., across districts, was resisted by both blacks and whites, integration by location was a fact before I ever started school. I wrote a couple of essays on this subject a number of years ago and rather than spending the time re-writing, I'll dig in the archives and try to find them. Hopefully they got transferred to CD from floppy or tape (mag media has a very short life in the swamp!).
As to folk that should be considered true black heros, two immediately come to mind. We studied them in grammar school and their lives make excellent reading. I re-read Up from Slavery: an autobiography by Booker T. Washington a couple of years ago. That link takes you to the text download on the Project Gutenberg site but if you would like a cleaned up rtf file in 12 point Arial, drop me a note. It's 119 pages and 900 KB. Really worth reading.
The other is George Washington Carver. As an alumnus of Iowa State, he's got a really good site there.
Another interesting read is also available from Project Gutenberg. The Future of the Colored Race in America was written by abolitionist preacher William Aikman in 1862 and is fascinating. I've also got it available as a 29 page, 88 KB rtf for the price of an email.
I've no idea who Nicholas Stix is, but he doesn't seem to hold MLK in high esteem. Hard to find anything to refute anything he wrote but he's certainly not gonna win any awards from Jesse or Al!
'nuff for now.
