5,113 words
The recent movie on Elvis Presley[1] is exceptional in its acting, script, and production. For those interested in such matters, it is also excellent as cultural history.
The movie deals to a significant extent with the African influences on Presley’s music. As a little boy growing up in a poor, integrated neighborhood, he was fascinated by the rhythms and gyrations of the blacks, including black gospel music. (more…)
1,457 words
1970’s Halls of Anger is low-budget, tense, sensational, but real. Calvin Lockhart plays Quincy Davis, an ex-basketball star who’s happy teaching in a suburban high school until integration comes and he’s reassigned to a ghetto school, as are several white students. The principal, Boyd Wilkerson (John McLiam), couldn’t care less about his students; he wants more federal money (from integration) and a chance to get elected to the school board. (more…)
Tim Pool
2,680 words
It’s always interesting when I find someone who shares a clean sweep of my politics but for largely different reasons. Such a person seems completely in line with my outlook, but really isn’t. Although in Tim Pool’s case, I’ll bet that he is and just doesn’t realize it yet.
For the past several months Tim Pool has been banging the Trump drum. (more…)
“I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
3,923 words
I’m not going to claim that I have been totally 1488 from day one or that I came goose-stepping out of the womb. But I think I have always been instinctively and intuitively a race realist. Or at least, I have been since around the age of 8. The first black person I ever met was this kid named Scooter when I was in kindergarten. This would have been in the early 80s. (more…)
1,629 words
Steve Luxenberg
Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, And America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019
Steve Luxenberg is a Washington Post associate editor and protégé of the Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. In 2019, he published a book called Separate, which describes the (more…)
2,303 words
I attended a small (about 160 students per grade) Midwestern high school only ten minutes from a metropolis, but the neighborhood had large houses with high property taxes and the district had gerrymandered the auto-enrollment zone to keep the school about 90 percent white with a smattering of Asians (several boys named Tenzin). (more…)
Harry Truman announcing the Democratic Party’s commitment to “civil rights” at the 1948 convention, after the party’s leadership realized they didn’t need the South’s support to pursue their agenda.
3,770 words
Historians puzzle over how the French Revolution happened. How did a powerful monarchy in a powerful nation fall apart and succumb to a radical government that drenched Paris in blood and turned the world’s most economically valuable colony, San Domingo, into the jungle that is today’s Haiti? There are many reasons, of course: (more…)