Below is a news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up several years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery. The goal of the … Continue reading A Hidden piece of Black History: “White Lies,” Selma, Two Murders, & A Cameo
The Southern Baptists, you ask me, buried the lead (or lede if you’re old school) about their 2019 national convention as deep as possible: The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Birmingham, Alabama last week was driven by recent, sensational news reports of hundreds of unaddressed sexual abuse cases involving SBC pastors and other church … Continue reading Church Sex Scandals, and the Buried Lead
In both places, and along innumerable roads between, beginning mid-spring of each year the orange daylilies gawked and mocked at me from their roadside strongholds. I grimly respected their endurance, but it was clear my death stares failed to faze them.
And finally there was some relief, even during the tough southern summers: my mail delivery days were behind me. I had scrabbled over the threshold into the large category of southerners who wisely regard central air to be fully as vital to survival as water, barbecue or even Duke’s Mayonnaise.
Maybe it was only after I became re-acclimatized, several years into this southern sojourn, that I was ready to take in a startling revelation: turning a corner in some verdant neighborhood, I beheld a familiar green stalk, but one topped by a bloom of an unfamiliar hue.
[NOTE: This post first appeared in 2019. Unfortunately, only the increasing list of mass shooting sites, and the ever-growing roll of victims’ names have changed since.] If you blog about Quakers long enough, you get asked a lot of questions — including some surprises. Like the one that came in a few days ago, from … Continue reading An Active Shooter in Friends Meeting. Now what?
Besides all her amazing exploits in the antebellum Underground Railroad (working very frequently with purportedly nonviolent Quakers), Tubman was no pacifist. And when the war broke out, she was eager to help the Union forces win it. After working with wounded soldiers, she also served as a scout and a spy behind enemy lines.
But she got her big chance after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of 1863.