Category Archives: KKK

Rebuilding After the Earthquake, and A Birthday Rainbow

Spring Friends Meeting, Snow Camp North Carolina

 

This post was delivered as a message in Spring Friends Meeting on Eighth Month (August 11, 2024).

 

Today after meeting, Wendy and I are going to a small family birthday party, for a great-granddaughter who has turned seven.

That quiet gathering will be a very modest landmark in what has been a  very intense and weird month.

For that matter, this last four weeks have been vivid pieces of a  weird patchwork quilt that  raggedly covers eight long years.

Or nine years actually. It began as I watched an almost surreal ride down a golden escalator. From there it set off an improbable clamor that reached its first peak in an earthquake on November 8, 2016.

Not a geologic earthquake, but a political and cultural shaking every bit as real. Continue reading Rebuilding After the Earthquake, and A Birthday Rainbow

Saving Obama In Selma 2015: For Reading When You’re Not Thinking About Milwaukee

Durham, North Carolina, and Selma, Alabama

In the autumn of 2014, still settling into retirement in Durham, a question began nagging at me: was Barack Obama going to get shot in Selma Alabama the following March?

Now stay with me: was I just being more than normally paranoid?

Consider: March 7, 2015, would be the 50th anniversary of the first march for voting rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, headed for the state capitol in Montgomery.

When that march was attacked by deputies and state troopers, images of the melee were flashed around the world as “Bloody Sunday.” I was there (and recount it in the memoir, Eating Dr. King’s Dinner). Even though my Bloody Sunday assignment was to march with a second contingent — which didn’t happen because of the assault on the first — the experience left its marks on me as well. Continue reading Saving Obama In Selma 2015: For Reading When You’re Not Thinking About Milwaukee

Mark Robinson Update: Saggy Pants Worse Than KKK (& More)

The Washington Post

By Hannah Knowles
 — March 20, 2024 

[Excerpt] Planned Parenthood. Men with saggy pants. People who tore down Confederate flags and monuments. The Rev. Al Sharpton.

Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee in one of this year’s most competitive governor’s races, has declared them all comparable to or worse than the Ku Klux Klan in social media posts that have drawn little attention.

The posts are part of a long record of comments ranging from provocative to bigoted that are getting more scrutiny as the campaign heats up in North Carolina — and that some Republicans worry will be a liability in a battleground state.
 Continue reading Mark Robinson Update: Saggy Pants Worse Than KKK (& More)

NC Governor’s Race: It’s a Black & White Choice

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The Democratic attorney general and the Republican lieutenant governor won North Carolina’s primaries for governor on Tuesday, setting the stage for what will be an expensive and highstakes November contest in a state that the two parties see as a pivotal battleground in 2024.

Josh Stein and Mark Robinson, each of whom turned back multiple party rivals, will present a stark contrast for voters in the ninthlargest state’s fall elections.

Stein is a longtime member of North Carolina’s political scene, a lawyer with the endorsement of termlimited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and a long history of consumer advocacy before and during his time as AG. He’d be the state’s first Jewish governor if elected.

Robinson, meanwhile, is a former factory worker who splashed into conservative circles after a 2018 viral speech to his hometown city council — catapulting him to lieutenant governor in 2020 and the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. He’s North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant governor and would become the state’s first Black governor as well.

Continue reading NC Governor’s Race: It’s a Black & White Choice

A Weekend Read: The Atlanta Trials & Race

You Can’t Talk About Trump’s Georgia Case Without Talking About Racism

TIME Magazine — IDEAS
Janell Ross is the senior correspondent on race and identities for TIME.
Janell Ross, TIME Magazine

As the final bars of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” filled the room, former President Donald Trump took the stage in Windham, N.H. The audience, many of them white New Englanders and veterans, chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A” had to settle a bit before Trump could launch into a winding, military-themed speech at the August 8 campaign rally.

Continue reading A Weekend Read: The Atlanta Trials & Race