Category Archives: Black & White & Other Colors

Aretha, Her Father & Her Music: Not Far From The Tree

Where did Aretha Franklin’s unforgettable vocal power come from?
I glimpsed a big part of the answer one summer night in 1968.

It was Friday, June 21, in Washington DC: Leaders of the Poor Peoples Campaign, trying to fulfill Dr. King’s last dream, had built a shantytown, called Resurrection City, on the national mall. But the camp, and the campaign, were mired in various difficulties. Yet on that Friday evening, some participants got a welcome, memorable spell of relief. I was there with a tape recorder, and this is the heart of what I saw and heard:

Read more →

Update: Shooting Holes In Justice — Emmett Till & Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorials

Jackson was buried in a small cemetery near Alabama Highway 14 on the outskirts of Marion. His headstone is impressively carved with a figure of Jesus keeping vigil.
It too has been hit  by numerous bullets, from the one that knocked a chunk off the top, to seven or eight that close examination here reveals.
Emmett Till’s killers walked completely free. The Alabama trooper who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Fowler, shot and killed a second unarmed young black man in 1966. But forty-five years later, Fowler was convicted of manslaughter, and served several months in jail, before being released due to ill health.

Read more →

Dandruff on the Boss’s shoulder: Friends Central School Strikes Back

The FCS attorneys are from a heavyweight Philadelphia firm (three names before  the ampersand), and on June 3, they submitted a motion for dismissal of the lawsuit, and a supporting memorandum of law. (The full text is here.) In the memorandum, they spend 29 pages asserting, in numerous carefully-phrased ways, that “There’s nothing to see here — and you shouldn’t be looking at it anyway.”

Why not? Because, the biggest objection is that all the plaintiffs’ complaints are essentially religious, and thus out of bounds for civil courts . . .

Read more →

Civility, Schmivility: A Quaker Dialectic, Then & Now

Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers.

The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a  warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:

I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me when it appeared.

He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.

“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it  on the counter as he made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.

I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category:

Read more →