Black History Month

“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” Rosa Parks

Sometimes when history books mention the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, they portray Rosa Parks, who refused to yield her seat to a white man, as an elderly seamstress tired from a long day at work.  Actually she was just 42 years old and remained seated as a principled protest against the city’s humiliating Jim Crow laws.

I took up Nicole Anslover and Chris Young’s offer to attend their class on the Presidency since the topic, Richard M. Nixon’s foreign policy, sounded interesting.  Nicole and Chris have a knack for eliciting class discussion, and several students were very knowledgeable about the Vietnam War, the main topic, and in particulat his idiotis “Madman strategy” of hoping to convince Hanoi that he was liable of bombing them back to the Stone Age.  I restrained my participation to two short comments, calling Nixon a loner when students were describing his personality and interjecting that political considerations were never far from his thoughts when dealing with foreign policy.  The same, of course, can be said for his predecessors, JFK and LBJ, who feared being called “Soft on Communism.”  None wanted to be the first President to lose a war.  One student brought in a cartoon of “Tricky Dick” saying, “I am not a crook,” in denying participation in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only his nose grew to the length of Pinocchio’s when the former puppet told a lie.

Bill Buckley brought me a few more of his Region poems. Tthese lines from “Lover in a Milltown” might be a fitting intro for Anne Balay’s “Steel Closets: “Hold me, milltown woman./ Athene in jeans./ I hear the wheels tonight./ Ezekiel's wheels./ The low groan of mills/ throbs in our bedroom wall.”  In the oddly titled “Revolver in the Mountains Before a Semi Bashes My Toyota,” Buckley again refers to the Greek goddess, writing:

“It doesn’t matter what’s said to Athena.

Work is not enough in a steeltown.

You’ve got to

slam-dunk the body into oblivion,

so we don’t think.

You’ve got to practice the art of

amnesia – because between grief

and oblivion, we like grief,

that emotion which excuses our

industrial ethos

and helps us feel chromed.”

Angie and Dave had us over for spring rolls on Valentine’s Day, also Toni’s birthday number 69.  For the next ten days, I like to kid her, I’m only one year older than her.  The recipe came from Vee, one of Alissa’s housemates at Michigan State who is Vietnamese.  Inside a rice wrapper go shrimp, onions, sausage, carrots, a peanut-based sauce, rice vermicelli, jicama, and several other ingredients.  Angie bought a lemon meringue pie, Toni’s favorite, from Baker’s Square.  I got her macadamia nuts and Dave bought her Bailey’s Irish Cream.  James and Becca each made touching cards.

South African Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, nicknamed “Blade Runner” and “The fastest man on no legs,” is in jail, charged with murdering his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp.  The sports world is in shock. He must not have been able to handle his sudden celebrity status.

above, Oscar Pistorius; below, Jerry Davich

On Lakeshore radio Jerry Davich discussed whether it was time to drop Black History Month.  Of course not, is my reply.  There’s also a Polish Heritage Month, one for the Irish, and various Latino celebrations, none of which are meant to disparage any other group but rather to instill pride.  At a time when people forget or minimize the sacrifices folks like Rosa Parks went through (hell, many youngsters think Malcolm X stands for Malcolm the Tenth), what harm could raising consciousness about the history of African Americans do?  One African American Andrean graduate who called in repeated the George Santayana quote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  My friend Morning Bishop praised Jewish families who send their kids to Sabbath School to learn about their heritage. Some folks told Davich that Black history should be integrated into the story of America’s past rather than be taught separately.  Why not do both?

The IUN group Brother 2 Brother has organized a Black Film Festival, featuring “Church: The Movie” and “The Lying Truth.”  Nobody is being forced to attend.  The practical effect of Black History Month at IUN is that diversity money is available to bring in a first-class speaker.

Numerous classes are reading “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates” about two young black men, one a Rhodes Scholar and combat veteran, the other convicted of murder and serving a life sentence. Both Wes Moores grew up in Baltimore within blocks of each other and had troubled childhoods.  The author sought out his unfortunate doppelganger in prison and believes he might have gone down a similar path had not loved ones exiled him to military school before the lure of money from drug-dealing entrapped him. He is lecturing on campus in three weeks. I’ll have to invite Bill Pelke and Roy Dominguez.

At the Archives Friday were Sam Barnett, Jim Pratt from the History Book Club, two Crown Point High School alumni interested in school yearbooks, and a grad student writing a thesis on the history of sports at IUN.  I showed her Paul Kern and my Shavings issue that had mention of the basketball team coached by Braxton Pinkins 40 years ago.

An HBO documentary about birders in Central Park captured my interest.  The number and variety of migrating birds descending on the park in the spring and fall is quite amazing.  I recommended it to Anne Balay (who unfortunately has no TV) and Beamer Pickert, who seemed down on Valentine’s Day, repeating a quote comparing life to a box of chocolates (“a thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody asks for”).  He assured me he hasn’t been depressed in years and we compared favorite winter birds.  Mine are titmice and white-breasted nuthatches.