“I have
a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.” Martin Luther King, March on Washington, 1963
Stephon Clark
In
Sacramento, California, demonstrators gathered after the funeral of 22-year-old
Stephon Clark. On March 18 police shot Clark 20 times after they suspected him
of breaking neighbors’ windows. They
tracked him to his grandmothers’ backyard and claimed he had a gun that turned
out to be a cellphone. The Trump
administration has termed what happened a purely local matter. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions has blunted
Justice Department efforts from the Obama years to investigate police brutality
and stated publicly that local polices forces would be more effective if
subjected to less federal scrutiny. Reverend
Sharpton, speaking at the funeral and afterwards, disagreed, saying: “They've been killing young black men all
over the country, and we are here to say that we're going to stand with Stephon
Clark and the leaders of this family.
This is about justice. This is about standing with people with
courage.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “In police videos, an
officer is heard saying, ‘Hey, mute,’ before the sound cuts off, indicating
that the audio recording had been stopped. Sacramento's police chief said the
request to mute ‘builds suspicion’ and is part of the investigation.”
Martin Luther King in London, 1961
IUN
Librarian Scott Sandberg invited me to be a panelist on a program to discuss
Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize address “The Quest for Peace and
Justice.” It will take place on the
fiftieth anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. I shall talk about the relevance of King’s
goal of transcending racism and his tactical use of nonviolent forms of civil
disobedience. I was 14 when King came to
my attention as elegant spokesman during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Neighbors from the South claimed that outside
agitators were stirring up the trouble
and that most Alabama Negroes were content with the status quo. The Boycott gave the lie to that
argument. I marveled at King’s bravery,
tested by racist threats and being jailed in Montgomery for driving 30 miles
per hour in a 25-mph zone. In college I
was deeply moved by King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” where he
declared: “One
has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely,
one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
I still
recall hearing the news of Dr. King’s death and watching on TV Bobby Kennedy
informing supporters in Indianapolis.
Next day, as riots erupted in nearby Washington, DC, and around the
country, I attended a University of Maryland chapel service, where folks were
asked to hold hands and sing, “We Shall Overcome.” At the line “Black and white together,” I could only
imaging the bitterness black people must have been feeling. Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael
called the assassination “white America’s
biggest mistake.” Indeed, King’s
vision of a post-racist society was mine as well and, hopefully, all people of
good will.
At Ron
Cohen’s to work on a third edition of our Gary pictorial history, I learned
about a new book by Leonard Moore, “The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and
the National Black Political Convention of 1972.” Ron ordered it for the Archives although annoyed
that there was no mention of Mayor Richard Hatcher, the convention host and convener,
in this synopsis:
In March of 1972,
civil rights activists and black power leaders met for three days in Gary,
Indiana, looking to end their intense four-year feud that had effectively
divided Black America into two camps: integrationists and separatists. While
these tensions always existed within the black freedom struggle, the situation
escalated in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination.
National Black
Political Convention would bring together 8,000 of America's most important
black leaders. The convention's attempt to develop a national black agenda
would merge competing ideologies under the theme "unity without
uniformity." Over the course of three intense days, the convention
produced a document called "The National Black Political Agenda",
which covered areas critical to black life. While attendees and delegates
agreed with nearly everything within the document, integrationists had
fundamental issues with certain planks, such as the calling of a constitutional
convention along with the nationalist demand for reparations. As a result civil
rights activists and black elected officials withdrew their support less than
ten weeks after the convention. Since nationalists did not hold elective
office, have a broad constituency, nor have access to levers of real power in
pragmatic ways, their popularity within black communities rapidly declined,
leaving civil rights activists and black elected officials holding the mantle
of black political leadership in 1972 and beyond.
Black G.I.s at post exchange in Huachuka, AZ, 1942
In the
March 2018 issue of Journal of American
History is Thomas A. Guglielmo’s “A Martial Freedom Movement: Black G.I.s’
Political Struggles during World War II.”
Protest against humiliating Jim Crow practices took numerous forms,
including the stoning of the post exchange at Huachuca, Arizona in June 1944 at
army camps in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Pennsylvania,
blacks stormed supple rooms and fired weapons in response to physical abuse at
the hands of white officers, military police, and civilians. Boycotts against segregation took place at
Freeman Field officers’ club in Tuskegee, Alabama (Quentin Smith of Gary participated),
segregated chapels at Fort Clark in Texas, at a USA show in Fort Jackson, South
Carolina, and a dance at Camp Gordon Johnson in Florida. Future Mississippi civil rights activist
Aaron Henry organized boycotts of a segregated movie theater on a troop
transport shop en route to
Hawaii. Citing Sherie Mershon and Steven
Schlossman’s “Foxholes and Color Lines: Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces”
(1998), Guglielmo concluded: “Jim Crow’s
prodigious wartime inefficiencies, some of which were a direct result of the
martial freedom movement, helped push America’s military and civilian
leaders toward integration.”
Matt Atherton and Dennis Norton
Tony Sanchez
Jerry
Davich wrote about Portage teacher Matt Atherton of Willowcreek Middle School inviting mentor
Dennis Norton, 78, to speak to his class.
Davich’s favorite instructor was Tony Sanchez, who taught him at
Kennedy-King School in Miller. After
reading Davich’s Post-Tribune column,
Sanchez wrote:
Thanks, Jerry. You made me
cry again. My spirit is so uplifted that I think I could go another ten years! I wish there
were stronger words to express my gratitude for your kind words. Let’s say that
you’ve made an old teacher very happy.
My favorite
Upper Dublin history teacher was H.M.
Jones, who, I later learned in college, was fired for propositioning male
students. Jones coached varsity baseball
and was a scout for the L.A. Dodgers. I
first got wind of his sexual proclivities when he made a play for a friend on a
scouting trip. At first I was totally
devastated but probably shouldn’t have been surprised. He hung out quite a bit in the boys locker
room, where guys showered after gym. In
his classroom, if a girl took off a shoe at her desk, anyone was free to throw
it out the window. He took particular
delight teasing minister’s daughter Vicki Vroom, who needlessly worried she’d
done poorly on tests. H.M. would hand
exams back going from best to worst and commonly keep Vicki’s till near the
end.
LeeLee Devenney in 2017
Former
Upper Dublin classmate LeeLee Devenney and husband Robert are celebrating their
fiftieth anniversary by embarking on a two-week guided tour to Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan. They met in Afghanistan
while she was in the Peace Corps. LeeLee
wrote: “Our kids think we are a bit crazy but well aware
we love an adventure.” My response, that my
upcoming adventure was going to Finland in June, must have sounded pretty
lame. Toni and I love Middle Eastern
Kabob, Pilau (a rice dish), and Naam (flatbread), as well but know where to get
it closer to home.
IU Press
sent me an annual statement pertaining to my 1978 book “City of the Century,”
of which they have sold 4,375 copies, including 8 in 2017. My share of earnings: $0.00. There was a time when the press offered to
pay my royalties in books, either mine or by another author.
Brenda A.
Love’s Facebook message reminded me of a neighbor kid who’d occasionally take
target practice at the back of our house:
Usually, I am awakened by one of the cats around 2:30 am. I then will
pet them or feed them then go back to sleep for a few hours (if I’m lucky). Today,
however, I was awakened by the sound of a B.B. gun. Perhaps a Rough Rider B.B.
gun, I’m not sure. So, because I’m an idiot, I decide to go outside to
investigate. Some dipshit to the east of our house was shooting a B.B. gun at
about 2:45 am. I became quite alarmed when a B.B. struck the siding of our
house (I actually ducked). Not being a
complete idiot, I went inside and debated calling the police. But not knowing
exactly who was doing the shooting and being incredibly tired, I just went back
to sleep for an hour. So, to the person
or persons having fun with B.B. guns this morning: I hope you shoot your eye
out.
I bowled a 510
series, my best effort of the year. In
the final game, a 189, after a split and a blown tenpin, I made four strikes in
a row, including one where I apparently left the 6-10 only to have the tenpin
fall backwards and knock down the 6-pin.
On an adjacent alley George Villareal did a little jig whenever he
struck. Gene Clifford showed me a flight
tracker app that his grandson had put on his iPhone that shows images of every
plane in the Chicago area, including those overhead.
