By Stephen W. Angell
We don’t know the exact date, or the place, when Richard Bradshaw (“Brad”) Angell (1918-2010) had his encounter with the Klan. All the participants are dead, and the story has been passed on orally.
But we know the time and season: 1951, likely early spring. And the place, if not the exact location: Tallahassee, in northwest Florida. Continue reading Exclusive: A Quaker Was Noticed By the Florida Klan in 1951. It Didn’t Go Well. (But It Could Have Been Much Worse.)
Most folks who speak often in public tend to have a collection of anecdotes they repeat to illustrate familiar points. Dr. King, for instance, had a whole stack of sermon passages, which he shuffled like a deck of cards, to fill out various addresses. (Yes, “I have a dream” was one.)
Wendy Brown, academic doyenne, is another, still very much alive. She also has her go-to stories. Not being an academic, I only know one of hers: the tale of the near-broke little Carolina Quaker college which sold its soul to an Ayn Rand-obsessed mega-donor, for half a million dollars and a ten-year supply of her doorstop clunker screed, Atlas Shrugged.
Brown dropped this nugget into a lengthy Times interview early last month, which we duly noted here.
But that wasn’t enough for The Paper of Record. Continue reading Guilford Is In “The Times” Again— Yes, With Ayn Rand
Someday, I’m thinking, there will be a historic marker on (or near) the campus of Friends University in Wichita, Kansas.
And if I last long enough to see it go up, I gotta take a selfie standing next to it. And if I’m really lucky, maybe Caitlyn Fox will take one with me.
I’ll get to Caitlyn in a minute. That Wichita historic marker won’t be about me, but it will point to where my Quaker journalistic “career” started, in late June of 1977. I lived a year there one week, four and a half decades ago, and from recent reports it seems some things there haven’t changed a bit in those 45 years. Continue reading Well, FU to Friends University: you Flunked the Freedom of Expression Exam Big Time.
“Predictions are hard,” said the sage yogi Berra, “especially about the future.”
Yet sometimes there are exceptions — predictions that are easy.
Like this one: Continue reading Showdown Week at Guilford: Who Will be Its New President?