Monday, January 15th, our country will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this year the actual date of his birthday. It takes me back to the day of his "Dream" speech, when Jim Crow was fighting to keep blacks separate and unequal.
With the 17th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks drawing near, my mind is drawn back to the images of the First Responders, laden with gear, climbing up the stairs at the twin towers as everyone else was coming down to escape. I am thinking about all the lives lost that horrid day, including the lives of the First Responders- the fire fighters who put their lives on the line every day.
WHAT THE HECK IS THIS STORY ABOUT? That’s the critical question every author, fiction or nonfiction, has to answer. In my case, I had so much material–the thousands of pages of letters, diaries, documents, etc. I found in my parents’ [...]
I wanted to find a way to connect this week’s blog post with last weekend’s display of hateful bigotry: white supremacists violently protesting the removal of Confederate General Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. Demanding that Confederate symbols remain is another way of saying “We approve of the Confederate stance that blacks should be enslaved; that they are subhuman.” Even if only the most racist of Americans would actually mouth those words today (like the white supremacists in Charlottesville), back in the 1950s and 1960s, whites spoke openly against blacks entering their communities–and thought they had good reason.
I was inspired to write this post by an article in the Guardian by @NatalieYMoore, Chicago’s South Side reporter for WBEZ. ("Don't let Simpson Blind us to Black Victims of Injustice.") Last week the focus was on OJ’s parole from prison for the 2008 sports memorabilia robbery. After serving nine years, he’ll probably be released early, from his thirty-three year sentence, in October. It took me back to another October–twenty-two years ago, 1995, when a jury acquitted OJ of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. The media were all over the story: Most blacks cheering; most whites were outraged.