Two Nights & a Lifetime with Dr. King Next Monday will be devoted to the work and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was my good fortune to work under Dr. King in the great voting rights campaign he led with others in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Besides being historic for America, that experience … Continue reading For MLK Day: Stories from Selma, January 16
“Watch this, Amber,” Sara said, building up to a big finish. She whirled around and threw her arms out in a wide flourish. And when she did, the scoop of soft cookies and cream flew right off the top of the cone and landed splat! right on the side window of a parked white van.
Sara heard the splat and stopped to look, and we both saw a long white drip sliding down the dark glass. She turned to me, eyes wide, mouth open, ready to start giggling.
But then the van’s window rolled down several inches, and a man in dark sunglasses looked out at us. “Hey, young lady,” he said, “better be careful with that stuff.”
Now instead of giggling, Sara squealed and we both turned and ran down the block, all the way to where our houses faced each other across the street. When we got to her place I stopped and glanced back, and the van’s window was closed again. We both stood by her porch for a minute, giggling and laughing and trying to catch our breath. Finally Sara said, “That was wild!”
“Yeah,” I said, “if Sanjaya had tried that, he would have won for sure!”
Law & Order’s Special Victims Unit had nothing on Genevieve “Gigi” Burkhalter of Durham NC; but that wasn’t going to stop the North Carolina state troopers who do security around the governor’s mansion in Raleigh. The mansion is currently occupied by governor Pat McCrory, known worldwide as the face of HB2, Carolina’s trans-hostile Bathroom Law.
The troopers were sure they saw a crime being committed there under cover of darkness on April 15, 2016, and when they followed up what they saw on a security videocam, there it was, on the green lawn near the mansion.
A bomb? A corpse? A cache of erased State Department emails? No, wait — it was a toilet.
But not just any toilet. A rainbow toilet. Bearing a sign:
“Gov. McCrory, your hands are not clean. Cut the Crap! #We Came 2 Slay HB2.”
Ten thousand of them were packed into a camp called Manzanar, in the remote Owens Valley of California. Owens Valley could be a good definition of the “middle of nowhere.”
It’s almost 120 miles north of Death Valley in California, and 100-plus from the eastern entrance to Yosemite. This is the Owens Valley. It’s home to bands of Paiute-Shoshone Indians, some hardy fruit farmers, cattle ranchers, and not much else on two legs.
From here it’s 336 miles to San Francisco, 226 to LA, and almost 250 to either Reno or Vegas. “Manzanar” is Spanish for apple orchard.”
This is high desert, nearly 4000 feet, so it’s hot in the summer, freezing and snowy in winter, and whipped by strong winds at any season. Twenty miles or so west are the Sierra Nevada mountains, usually capped by snow and fantastic slow-swirling cloud formations.
Conditions were tough in the camps. Legal challenges to the internment were turned aside, even by the Supreme Court. Most Japanese-Americans were kept in the camps until late 1945, when the war ended.
Jim Corbett was by no means a conventional social activist. But one night in the early 1980s, he volunteered to help find legal assistance for a Salvadoran refugee arrested by the Border Patrol. But before he could file the required forms, the Salvadoran was abruptly deported, in defiance of the U.S. government’s own laws. Corbett was shocked, then galvanized. From this spontaneous effort to respond to the refugees’ plight sprang what became the Sanctuary movement.
The movement was not unlike the later Occupy upsurge, only more low-profile, based in religious communities. It eventually involved hundreds of churches and synagogue across the U.S., and helped thousands of refugees who fled massacres and war in Central America — wars mostly supported by the U.S. government policy. As part of this policy, the refugees were mischaracterized as “economic migrants,” and many were deported, with more war and death waiting for them.