Category Archives: Black & White & Other Colors

Snow Camp & The Underground Railroad – Beyond Mythmaking

At Snow Camp we’re working at broadening the vision that created our acclaimed historical drama, Pathway to Freedom, to bring out more awareness of our practical connections to the actual Underground Railroad. I admit, though, that sometimes I’m tempted to believe, as one prominent historian has argued, that the “Underground Railroad” (UGRR) is mainly a … Continue reading Snow Camp & The Underground Railroad – Beyond Mythmaking →

The Deaths Of Racism, And Racism In Deaths

Helena then beckoned us through an opening in the low wall, into what seemed an empty field.
This plot was meant to be added to the cemetery (since UVA professors keep stubbornly falling short of immortality). But when archaeologists tested the ground, they discovered that it too was full of unmarked, and previously unknown graves.

The Poet Laureate of a Banned Black History Month! Langston Hughes–Sing us a bit of your famous Blues!

It’s Langston Hughes’s birthday (1902-1967). Known primarily as a poet, Hughes was a versatile writer: by his mid-twenties he had published challenging essays in national periodicals, and two books of poetry. I’m reading his first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, when he was 28.

This passage evokes a domestic scene in a small Kansas city, modeled on Lawrence, where Hughes spent several boyhood years. Hughes was proud of his humble roots, and the creativity it wrung from hardship, like the largely homemade blues songs by the itinerant laborer Jimboy. Here he has returned after a long absence seeking work. In Hughes’s prose, we can hear the poetry woven through it.

A Year of #45. My Year of Resistance.

Many other resisters were organizing to descend upon the public meetings of regime-supporting Congressmen & women, a great many of whom did not want to face or hear from their constituents. That was true of many Members from Carolina, and still is of some. But one exception, in early May, was Republican Rep. Mark Walker from the Sixth district, has been drastically gerrymandered to make Walker’s reelection seemingly safe. So on a May morning he decided to hold a public meeting, and since I had business out that way, I decided to drop in on it — not to speak, since I’m not a resident, but to observe.
A staffer shoved a ticket into my hand when I entered. As I sat down, it was announced that tickets would be drawn from a box to choose questioners.
And the first ticket drawn was — mine??
What? It was true. So I stumbled up to the microphone, trying to think quickly of a question that might get past his well-practiced talking points.
Somehow I succeeded. Walker had previously been a preacher, and so I asked him if he believed in the Ninth of the Ten commandments, the one against “bearing false witness” (i.e., telling lies.) A bit puzzled, he said he did.
So then I asked what he thought about the tally the Washington Post had been publishing each week since inauguration, tracking and documenting #45’s lies, which were running at about 5 per day. Was he okay with that?

Now Walker was really befuddled. As he stuttered, it appeared he might not be exactly sure what the Washington Post was, and he certainly didn’t know anything about this tally. But after much backing and filling, and under my prodding, he did finally manage to come out more or less foursquare against telling lies, without being more specific. Not his best performance.

Other questions were mostly about health care, aka Obamacare, which he was against. As an accidental resister, I felt afterward that I had done okay that morning.