While there's not always one right way to answer an interview question, some approaches are better than others. Here are some questions from the survey that you may face in your next interview, along with tips on how -- and how not -- to answer them:
"Can you tell me a little about yourself?"
Do: Prepare for this popular question -- which is often the first one asked -- by developing an incisive summary of your career. Your sound bite should be succinct but include enough detail about your pertinent skills, work experience, accomplishments and goals that the hiring manager can quickly see what you bring to the table.
Don't: Give your life story, discuss leisure pursuits or describe aspects of your professional background that aren't relevant to the position you're interviewing for.
"Why do you want to join our company?"
Do: Walk into the interview with beyond-the-basics knowledge of the company. Read its website and marketing materials and relevant news stories to gain a good grasp of its mission, history, reputation and corporate culture. The more information you collect, the more specific you can be about why you're an excellent fit.
Don't: Answer in the context of your financial needs. Saying, "I hear you provide good pay and benefits" or, "Frankly, I need a job" won't score you any points.
"What's your biggest weakness?"
Do: View this as an opportunity to demonstrate your self-awareness, sincerity and problem-solving prowess. Mention an area where you could improve and spotlight the steps you've taken to do so.
Here's an example: "In the past, I sometimes overextended myself. Reading time-management books has helped me, though. Now, I make prioritized to-do lists, I've learned it's OK to delegate and I volunteer for extra projects only when I'm caught up on core responsibilities."
Don't: Offer a transparently fake flaw ("I care too much about my work.") or pretend to be perfect ("Weaknesses? None come to mind."). And, of course, don't be your own worst critic by citing countless shortcomings.
"Where do you see yourself in five years?"
Do: Position yourself as an ambitious but flexible realist. One way to do this is to speak of your desire to continually take on broader responsibilities and grow professionally no matter what role you're in. You also might emphasize your commitment to lifelong learning by mentioning your interest in attaining advanced industry certifications.
Don't: Focus on an overly lofty objective. For instance, boldly proclaiming you intend to be the firm's next chief financial officer when you're an entry-level accounting candidate certainly shows drive, but it's not a practical five-year objective. In addition, steer clear of fanciful daydreaming ("I'll be counting my lottery winnings on a Hawaiian beach.").
"Why are you looking to leave your current employer?"
Do: The interviewer is trying to figure out if you truly want the position, or if you're looking for any way out of a bad job. Reiterate what you like about the role you're seeking rather than gripe about the one you hope to vacate. Make it clear you're chasing a great opportunity, not running away from an unpleasant situation.
Don't: Speak ill of your current employer. Regardless of how unhappy you are with your job or company, never act bitter or resentful in an interview. Hiring managers seek candidates who are loyal, positive-minded and team-oriented. They aren't inclined to hire people they perceive to be potential headaches.
Finally, despite your best efforts, you can't anticipate every question you'll be asked.
"How would you define your personality in one word?" or "How will you behave if you get blamed for something you didn't do?" were just two of the unique questions that popped up in a survey of hiring managers.
If an interviewer throws you a curveball, maintain eye contact, take a deep breath and pause to consider your response. Many of your competitors will fluster easily. Set yourself apart by keeping your cool in the hot seat.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Remembering the Freedom Riders
Mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested on May 24, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi, after arriving from Montgomery, Alabama. They were arrested after going into a whites-only waiting room and refusing to move on when asked to do so by police.
Remembering the Freedom Riders
by Calvin TrillinLast fall, at a gathering in Santa Fe on the subject of storytelling, I met a woman whose name sounded familiar. It turned out that I had last encountered her precisely fifty years before. She was then a six-year-old African-American girl, Ruby Bridges, being escorted into William Frantz School, in New Orleans, by federal marshals every morning, and I was a reporter standing across the street from the school, observing a gang of women who were spewing obscenities and racial epithets at her. I remember "black ape" as one of the phrases they were particularly fond of Morning after morning, I stood amidst those women, some of whom seemed to have settled comfortably into their role as featured players on the evening news. When I approached one of them with a question during the second week, her response was "I only speak to Martin Agronsky" -then a well-known correspondent for NBC. Ever since, I've had on the wall of my office a photograph, taken by a Life photographer, of a worried-looking little girl flanked by two men wearing U.S. Marshal armbands. In Santa Fe, I told Ruby that it was nice to see her all grown up.
The desegregation of the New Orleans schools took place toward the beginning of a year I spent in the South, in the Atlanta bureau of Time--from the fall of 1960 to the fall of1961. It's a period now being recalled in any number of half-century commemorations, because a lot happened in that twelve-month span. The public schools of New Orleans and Atlanta were desegregated. A federal judge ordered two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, into the University of Georgia. Sit-in movements succeeded in desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities in Atlanta and Nashville. Freedom Riders made their way through the South in an effort to demonstrate that Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were routinely flouted on buses and in waiting rooms. Both before and after those twelve months, there were extended periods-from the Montgomery bus boycott, in the mid-fifties, until the first sit in, in 1960, for instance-when the civil rights story faded from the front pages. The country had not yet begun to see segregation as a moral wrong that had to be addressed rather than as a regrettable regional peculiarity. The reporter I replaced as the junior man in the two-man Atlanta bureau had left six months before I arrived; the reporter in that position when I returned to Atlanta early in 1963, just before the brutal response of police dogs and fire hoses to demonstrations in Birmingham shocked the nation, told me that, as far as he could tell, the civil-rights story had pretty much petered out.
During the year I was in the South, I occasionally worked on something other than civil rights. During the first burst of national coverage of the John Birch Society, whose founder famously believed that § Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist conspiracy, I was dispatched to Macon, Georgia, to look into the early life of the man the society was named after. (I concluded that it had probably been named appropriately: as an undergraduate at Mercer University, a Southern Baptist school, Birch had managed to provoke a heresy trial of several professors.) Now and then, I was assigned to contribute to what was called a "business roundup" -phoning around to bankers to hear what they had to say about interest rates or inflation or the housing market. Mostly, though, I'd be at the airport early in the week for a flight to some-, place where Jim Crow was being threatened. (Air transportation was one reason for the bureau's location: it used to be said that when you die in the South you might go to Heaven, but you'd have to change planes in Atlanta.) Atlanta itselfwas going through sit-ins, boycotts, mass meetings, and an impending school desegregation. Even on weekends, I was on what we sometimes called the Seg Beat.
I wonder whether I would have remained in reporting if I had spent twelve months in the South when the civil-rights story was in one of its dormant periods twelve months of nothing more exciting than the occasional folksy conversation about interest rates with Mills B. Lane, Jr., of the Citizens & Southern National Bank. Time was then practicing what was called "group journalism," so that the correspondent in the field filed a long report for the writer in New York, who used it (among other sources) to write for a senior editor, who sometimes rewrote the piece with the fluidity available to someone who is working without the encumbrance of having read the original file. It was said that Time was a great place for a reporter to work unless he read the magazine. But I never felt that 1'd been wasting my time on reporting that didn't show up in the finished product, because I found myself building knowledge on a single subject: race. Any writing requires a leap of confidence-you have to convince yourself that somebody is going to be interested in what you put down on the page and believing that you know more about the subject than most of your readers do can work wonders for your confidence.
Once I'd accepted the job, I had, of course, done some reading. I knew from W. J. Cash's "The Mind of the South" that the scene then conjured up by the phrase "antebellum South"-a cultivated plantation owner composes poetry at his Louis XIV desk while dozens of his slaves sing in the cotton fields-was drawn from Hollywood rather than from history, even if most white Southerners accepted it as gospel. I knew from C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" that physical separation of the races was not something that had always been part of the fabric of life in the South but a system that had been installed in the eighteen-nineties, after Reconstruction. Mainly, though, what confidence I had came from dealing with the subject week after week. I heard so many sermons in black churches that I began holding what I called the Martin Luther King Extended Metaphor Contest. (King himself was ineligible, since he would have won in a walk every week.) I knew all the verses to 'We Shall Overcome." My expense account included items like "trousers torn in racial dispute" and "after prayer-meeting snack, Tuskegee, $3.75." I could calibrate a white Southerner's racial views by the way he pronounced the word "Negro." I'd been exposed to enough Ku Klux Klan terminology to know a kleagle from a klaxon from a klavern. I had watched ordinary people make momentous moral decisions-a white mother in New Orleans deciding that she had to walk her first grader past that gang of screaming women outside William Frantz School in defiance of a white boycott, a Greek-immigrant diner owner with tears in his eyes telling black sit-in students in Atlanta that, as much as he sympathized with their cause, serving them would mean the end of his business. I was deeply immersed in what my daughters call my Boy Reporter Mode. I loved it.
The University of Georgia has celebrated two anniversaries of its desegregation. At the fortieth, a building was renamed the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building. During a panel at the fiftieth, last January, Robert Cohen-a civil rights historian who taught for a time at Georgia and is now at N.Y.U.-said that, given the academic and cultural constrictions of Jim Crow, he thought that what had happened a half century before was not that the university was desegregated but that it was freed. Under Jim Crow, Cohen said, Georgia could never have hoped to attract enough professors of distinction to become a firstrate university. How many prominent musicians and artists were going to visit a campus that had, for instance, withdrawn an invitation to Dave Brubeck when it turned out that his combo included a black bass player? Cohen didn't even have to mention how an all-white Georgia football team would have fared in today's Division 1 competition. What he was saying, it seemed to me, was that desegregation had freed a place like the University of Georgia to become part of the United States. In the year I was there, the South-a region where people were constantly being told that what stood between them and the "mongrelization of the races" was racially designated drinking fountains-sometimes seemed like a foreign country.
Or was it, as some would have claimed, simply a section of this country where the presence of two societies was out in the open and codified? For black people, the Jim Crow practiced in the Deep South was, of course, a different order of misery from the form of racial separation that existed in the rest of the country, but it wasn't as if the rest of the country was casually integrated. Kansas City, Missouri, my home town, was largely segregated black people had their own movie theatre and restaurants, for instance----even though it was segregated without signs and rhetoric. When I graduated from high school, in 1953, the schools in Missouri were legally segregated, and, given the absence of speeches connecting that fact to the preservation of the Kansas City Way of Life, I wasn't even aware of it. The board of education referred to in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, was, of course, in Topeka, Kansas-sixty miles down the road, in what had been an antislavery state. At Yale, the first place I'd lived outside Missouri, there were perhaps four or five black students in my class of a thousand or so, and it was taken for granted that a corps of black retainers from New Haven served white students in clubs and societies. The father of Constance Baker Motley, the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the University of Georgia case, was for a time the chef at Skull and Bones. I had never lived in a state whose United States senators warned about the mongrelization of the races, but when I spent that year in the South antimiscegenation laws were still in force not only in Missouri but in such states as Wyoming and Indiana.
The rhetoric did make a serious difference in the views of white Southerners. It seeped through the defenses of people who thought of themselves as independent and enlightened. It was an article of faith among Southern white people, for instance, that non-Southerners simply couldn't understand the situation, partly because they didn't understand black people. A remarkable number of white people I met in the South-not just obvious bigots but respectable, decent people who may themselves have even thought that change had to come-believed racial incidents occurred only because of meddling by outsiders. Yankee reporters were, of course, part of the meddling process. ('Where you from?" was the first question asked of a reporter who encountered a deputy sheriff "I work out of the Atlanta bureau" was not considered a satisfactory answer.) If resistance to change included violence, the press was not just resented but targeted-particularly members of the press who were recording the violence in pictures. In Atlanta, Time shared an office with Life, and I used to say to Donald Uhrbrock, a Life contract photographer, "When we get in one of those situations, at best I don't know you. At worst, I'm one of the people chasing you." Even in the relatively progressive confines of Atlanta, where I had college friends who were natives and where there was an abundance of Yankees in southeastern branch offices, my presence at a social gathering could cause some strained questions or an argument or, worst of all, an attempt to enlighten me about "the Negro" with what I came to think of as yard-sale anthropology. Once, when there was no answer to a phone call I'd made on the Fourth of July to a friend who was studying in Paris, it occurred to me that he might be at the U.S. Embassy's annual Independence Day party. Before I realized where I was, I found myself wondering why the Embassy didn't have such a party in Atlanta.
There were two major commemorations of the Freedom Rides anniversary this spring, one in Jackson, Mississippi, and one in Chicago. (The Chicago event had originally been set for Washington, D.C., where the Freedom Rides had begun. But Oprah Winfrey, who wanted as many Freedom Riders as possible to be either in the audience or onstage for the taping of a show dedicated to the anniversary, offered to fly everyone to Chicago and pay for two nights in the convention-center hotel.) In simplest terms, the Jackson gathering-which was officially co-hosted by Governor Haley Barbour and Bennie Thompson, a black congressman from Mississippi-was a commemoration of a historical period, in the spirit of reconciliation and even apology. The Chicago gathering was a reunion organized by people who believe that the struggle is still going on. One of its organizers, the Reverend Jim Lawson, who fifty years ago had instructed the students of the Nashville movement on the principles of nonviolence, still gives classes in nonviolence. Two others, Diane N ash, a leader of the Nashville movement, and C. T. Vivian, a minister who was active in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, are still working with a project in Neshoba County, Mississippi. A fourth, Ralph D. Fertig, was recently the plaintiff in a Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act. I wasn't surprised to hear that those four organizers of the Chicago gathering had distributed a letter explaining, in strong language, why they wouldn't be attending the Jackson event. Even within the movement, the Freedom Rides were contentious from the start.
They came along at a time when the civil-rights story in the South was shifting. Before the sit-ins gained traction, the story was often covered from the white side ofthe street. There were a few black lawyers, like Constance Motley, bringing legal cases, mostly in school desegregation; there were a few black students involved in desegregating the schools. But the story was mainly about how white people would respond to pressure to change. Would the governor who had campaigned on a platform of "not one, no not one" close the University of Georgia if Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were ordered in by a federal judge? Would business leaders in Atlanta or New Orleans find some peaceful accommodation to school desegregation and thus avoid the turmoil that could lead to the economic stagnation expressed as "another Little Rock"? Increasingly, during the year I was in the South, the impetus moved to the black side of the street.
In Montgomery, during the Freedom Rides, I heard Martin Luther King say that while Brown v. Board of Education had been the legal turning point in the movement, the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins were the psychological turning point. With hundreds of black students from local universities risking injury by sitting nonviolently at whites-only lunch counters, it had become more and more difficult to claim that both white and black people would be content with the Southern Way of Life if outsiders would just stop interfering. To put it another way, black people-particularly, young black people got tired of waiting and took matters into their own hands.
King said that the Freedom Rides were an extension of that psychological turning point. Under the sponsorship of the Congress of Racial Equality, the campaign had begun on May 4,1961, when two buses embarked from Washington, D.C.; it was abandoned ten days later, in Birmingham, after the riders on one bus were attacked by a mob there and the other bus was firebombed in Anniston, sixty miles or so to the east. Within days, students from the Nashville movement appeared in Birmingham to take up where CORE had left off-riding from there to Montgomery and eventually on to Jackson. But at the beginning many black leaders in the South had not, in fact, seen the Freedom Rides as an extension of the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-in movements. Privately, people like Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. in Mississippi, expressed serious reservations or even outright hostility.
CORE, which had its headquarters in New York, was not unknown in the South. Jim Lawson was a member. John Lewis, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, was on both a CORE bus from Washington and the bus that Nashville students rode from Birmingham to Montgomery. There was a CORE chapter in New Orleans. By and large, though, those of us on the Seg Beat thought of CORE as a Northern organization. It was led at the time by James Farmer, an imposing man with a mellifluous voice-we sometimes called him "the black Orson Weiles"-and the most cynical view of the Freedom Ride was that it was an attempt by Farmer to gain some standing for CORE in the South, where there was jockeying for influence among the N.A.A.C.P. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
As many critics within the movement saw the Freedom Rides, a group of out-Mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested on May 24, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi, after arriving from Montgomery, Alabama. They were arrested after going into a whites-only waiting room and refusing to move on when asked to do so by police. Riders had come up with away of reinvigorating the old lie about a peaceful South being beset by outside agitators-leaving the locals to deal with whatever repercussions were left behind. White liberals were particularly incensed. In Montgomery, where first the press and then the Freedom Riders were set upon by a mob when the bus from Birmingham arrived at the Trailways station, a local man I thought of as open to the proposition that black people ought to be treated as hill citizens said to me, "I was sickened today. For the first time, I was ashamed of being from this town. But this is not sympathy for those nuts. I hate them." It occurs to me now (it didn't then) that if people were going to show that Supreme Court decisions on desegregating interstate waiting rooms had been ignored in the South, those people would have to be outsiders either where they got on the bus or where they got off the bus. Most of the people on those first CORE buses did live in the North, but Farmer rejected the outsider label from the start. 'We don't believe we're outsiders," he said, "because we're Americans."
A Gallup poll in the spring of 1961 found that only one in four Americans approved of the Freedom Ride. (The Kennedy Administration, for a variety of reasons, simply wanted it to go away; one of the speakers at the Chicago gathering referred to John and Robert Kennedy as "the brothers grim.") There had been a similar pattern with the sit-ins. Partly because sitting in at a department-store lunch counter involved consciously breaking the law-and in a privately owned establishment where the proprietor presumably had a right to decide whom he would serve-it had been opposed by some people in the movement, not to speak of many people outside the movement. (The same poll indicated, at a time when the Nashville sit-in movement had pretty much completed the desegregation of the city, that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed the sit-ins and other demonstrations would hurt rather than help the chances of Negroes being integrated in the South.) The sit-in movement, though, had an almost romantic appeal-polite, well-dressed black college students sitting peacefully at a lunch counter while hooligans harassed or even attacked them. Once, when I was allowed in the Atlanta jail to interview some students who had been arrested at a sit-in, I could hear the faint sound of singing grow louder as a guard and I walked toward the cell where they were being held; by the time we reached the cell, the freedom songs, echoing off the jailhouse walls, sounded like a full church choir. I can still conjure up the scene in my mind; I can still hear the singing.
The Freedom Ride was a tougher sell, even after the baton was passed in Birmingham from CORE to the Nashville movement. It appeared that the South's disregard of Supreme Court rulings on interstate transportation could be dramatically demonstrated only if the Freedom Riders who integrated bus stations were met with violence-whether the violence was described by Southern politicians as "looking for trouble" or by nonviolent theoreticians as "cleansing the soul with blood." A number of places in Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia had simply allowed the Freedom Riders to mill about in the whites-only waiting room until their bus left, and then returned to segregated business as usual. Jim Lawson was blunt about the violence. "Chances are that without people being hurt you cannot solve the problem," he said.
By the time the Freedom Ride was stalled for a few days in Montgomery, a united front had formed, but there remained differences in how to proceed. While people like Martin Luther King were trying to convince Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the federal government was obligated to provide protection for the Freedom Rides, people like Jim Lawson, who had volunteered to be on the first bus into Jackson himself, were arguing that protection should be declined, since the issue was not whether black people could use desegregated facilities as long as they travelled in a heavily armed caravan. I had witnessed what would happen without protection. We'd followed the bus by car from Birmingham to Montgomery, where the police escort melted away at the city limits and the Freedom Riders arrived at a station that didn't have a policeman in sight. (Yes, Don Uhrbrock, the Life photographer, was among the first to be assaulted; when the attackers went for his camera, he had the presence of mind to give them a blank roll of film that he had palmed, keeping the roll that provided Life with a full-page picture of one of them pulling back his foot to kick a TV cameraman who had been knocked to the ground.) At a mass meeting in Ralph Abernathy's church during the Montgomery hiatus, it was, in the opinion of many, only an unorganized but eventually effective perimeter of U.S. marshals that prevented the mob from storming the church or burning it down.
In Chicago, fifty years later, Lawson, who has spent much of the intervening time as the pastor of a United Methodist church in Los Angeles, sounded absolutely unchanged in attitude. 'We did not desegregate America," he said. 'We did not dismantle the system." The letter that he and three other organizers of the Chicago event sent to explain why they wouldn't be attending the Jackson commemoration argued, in effect, that the struggle needed especially to be continued in Mississippi ("A lot has changed in the state, but be assured, racism is alive and we1J in Mississippi"). The signatories said that the Jackson commemoration was part of an effort in Mississippi that amounted to "stealing the legacy of the civil rights movement so they can profit from tourism." Some dismal statistics in living standards and education and criminal justice were presented.
At the time, Haley Barbour was still thought of as a potential Presidential candidate. Although that candidacy wasn't mentioned, the letter tapped into a widespread concern that Barbour could use the commemoration as a cover with those minority voters who suspect that he is not truly reconstructed. A few months later, that would have become a particular necessity for him because of an interview in which he credited the Citizens Council with keeping the peace in his home town of Yazoo City during the times of trouble. The Citizens Council, which was founded specifically to resist desegregation, kept the peace in the sense that it favored economic intimidation over violence-having a potential troublemaker fired, say, or kicking his family off land they'd farmed for generations. Barbour made it sound like some benign United Fund committee. Others called it the uptown Klan.
In 1961, Mississippi was thought of as the most intransigent of the Southern states. A few years later, Nina Simone, who could exude a level of anger that made someone like Jim Lawson seem rather accommodating, started singing a song called "Mississippi Goddam." Ray Arsenault, who has written the definitive history of the Freedom Rides, and who spoke at both commemorative gatherings, likes to tell the joke about the 1964 Freedom Summer volunteer from the North who has finished his training in Ohio and finds himself terrified on the night before he's supposed to leave for Jackson. He kneels and says, "God, please send me a sign that you'll go with me to Mississippi." Finally, after a long pause, a deep voice from above says, "I'll go as far as Memphis."
Actually, I felt physically safer in Mississippi than I did in Alabama. In 1961, Mississippi's approach was still dominated by the Citizens Council, which was conscious of how violence could mar the image of a state that was sending speakers north to present itself as a peaceful place to do business. That approach was backed up by the State Sovereignty Commission-a government agency that had evolved into a sort of cornpone Stasi, with investigators who monitored people's writings and contacts and even their love lives. For a Yankee reporter in Mississippi in 1961, there was a feeling of being watched rather than pursued. Once, when I'd arranged an interview with the mayor of Jackson, I arrived at his office to find that local reporters were there as observers; so were the chief of police, the chief of detectives, the city attorney, a city councilman, and the mayor's secretary (to make a transcript). The story in the next day's paper began, "Mayor Allen Thompson told a Time magazine reporter yesterday... "I felt relatively safe in Mississippi, but also uneasy. I wondered if I was imagining that people I didn't know seemed to recognize me on the street. When I was ready to file a story overnight, I tried to do it from Memphis or New Orleans; 1'd phone my office and say, 'I’ve slipped over the border." After the Freedom Ride finally left Montgomery, I wrote in my Time file, "The brutal, chaotic bumbling of Alabama gave way to the well-oiled, kid-glove, image-conscious performance possible only in a monolithic police state."
As the first bus was about to pull out of Montgomery for Jackson, Claude Sitton, the Southern correspondent for the Times, and I were standing in the Trailways station discussing whether it was appropriate for reporters to be on it. In questions about when a reporter would be crossing the line from reporting on to participating in the civil-rights struggle, I tended to take my cues from Claude, whose sympathy was expressed in the fairness and scrupulousness of his reporting. I didn't pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides-the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people who acted on such a belief should have their houses burned down-had an equally compelling case to make. It wasn't like trying to remain objective while covering the Michigan-Ohio State game. But at mass meetings I would never have put any money in the collection cup. When, at the invariable end of the meeting, people in the congregation locked arms to sing 'We Shall Overcome," I always edged away toward the exit. Still, I thought we should be on that bus. I reasoned that it was a public bus and we had a right to buy tickets. Also, other reporters were buying tickets. Claude agreed that we should be on the bus, and we sat down just a couple of seats in back of the driver. When the bus finally left the station, there were more reporters on board than Freedom Riders. The passengers also included a small contingent of Alabama National Guardsmen. The bus moved out in a caravan of seventeen state-police cars.
At the Mississippi line, the Alabama escort withdrew. We were joined on the bus by some Mississippi National Guardsmen under the command of Lieutenant Colonel G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery, who later had a long career in Congress. Montgomery said that his orders were to take the bus directly to Jackson without stopping. In what I suppose was a reflection of my confidence that Mississippi was going to handle things in a Citizens Council rather than a Klan manner, I fell asleep. Then I felt Claude poking me. Reverend C. T. Vivian had asked for arrest stop, and Colonel Montgomery was answering in the negative. Vivian, who was sitting right across the aisle from us, began asking how Montgomery rationalized the acts he had to perform every day. I still remember snatches ofthe speech almost word for word. "What do you tell your wife when you get home?" Vivian said. "What do you say to your child? What do you say to your God when you pray? Or do you pray?" 1'd never imagined that a request to leave the room could be made with such eloquence. A Canadian reporter was so moved that he stood up and began shouting at Montgomery to stop the bus. Claude spoke sharply to the Canadian reporter. As I remember his words, he said, "Sit down and shut up. You're a reporter."
A photograph that was prominently displayed this spring at the Mississippi gathering shows a bus moving through downtown Jackson. Except for a policeman every ten or fifteen feet, the street is virtually empty. The bus is framed in the foreground by two policemen with German shepherds-presumably Rebel and Happy, the dogs that the Jackson police department borrowed on such occasions from the Vicksburg police department. (When Jackson police broke up a gathering of black people outside a courthouse a month before the Freedom Rides-the crowd had gathered in support of some Tougaloo College students who'd been arrested in Mississippi's first sit-in-it was alleged that a minister named S. Leon Whitney had been bitten, an allegation that the Jackson police vigorously denied.) The police contingent inside the Trailways station was under the command of Chief of Police Detectives M. B. Pierce, whom 1'd dealt with before. I suspected that Pierce had been chosen for his unflappability; he would only smile whenever I said to him, "I forget, Chief: was it Rebel that didn't bite Reverend Whitney or was it Happy that didn't bite Reverend Whitney?" When the Freedom Riders went into the whites-only waiting room, they were asked politely by the police to move on, and when they refused they were, just as politely, arrested-a policy that was also followed when a second bus pulled into the Greyhound station a few hours later, and followed for the next few months as people from all over the country showed their support by taking a bus to Jackson and serving ninety days in Parchman Prison. There were three black reporters on our bus, but when they came into the whites-only waiting room they were not bothered. Chief Pierce called that to my attention. "Professional courtesy," he said.
In Jackson this May, the Freedom Riders were praised for their bravery and their effectiveness. (The wrong they sought to demonstrate had indeed been corrected: under pressure from Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, the Interstate Commmerce Commission, In September of 1961, mandated that that 'Whites Only" signs be removed from interstate facilities.) Haley Barbour's speeches were cordial and complimentary and, in at least one case, apologetic. The speakers who shared the podium with Bardour at one event or the other included Jackson's black mayor and its second black female chief of police. As the commemoration began, an article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger recalled some of the smears against the Freedom Riders in 1961. Senator James Eastland had called one CORE rider "a Communist agitator and organizer of the most dangerous kind." (1'd heard Murray Kempton, a columnist known for sounding gracious even ifhe was describing a mobster, say of the same person, "A lovely man. A brave man. Of course, he'd walk a mile to get beaten up.") The editor of the Jackson Daily News, the Clarion-Ledger's sister paper, had referred in his column to the Freedom Riders as "deranged mammals." The Clarion-Ledger article was written by Jerry Mitchell, who over the past twenty years has won renown (and a MacArthur Fellowship) for stories that brought to justice civil-rights-era criminals like Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of Medgar Evers. The Jackson airport now bears Evers's name.
Fifty years before, Ross Barnett, then the governor of Mississippi, had called the Freedom Riders "outside agitators trying to stir up our people for no good cause whatsoever," but in his dealings with the press at the time he'd soundedjust as cordial as Haley Barbour. On the day after our bus's arrival, Barnett began his press conference by saying, "I'm pleased to say we're grateful indeed for your presence here. I extend a most cordial welcome to the great and sovereign state of Mississippi." For the reporters who were in Jackson to cover the Freedom Rides in 1961, Mayor Thompson had arranged a tour of the city-including what were then sometimes called "Supreme Court schools," schools built after Brown v. Board of Education for black children in an effort to demonstrate that "separate but equal" was something other than a joke. Thompson also gave us badges indicating that we were honorary members of the Jackson, Mississippi, police force.
One of Barbour's speeches was at the unveiling of a plaque that marked the old Greyhound station now restored as an architect's office) as a stop on what the state is calling the Mississippi Freedom Trial-a tourism scheme that is joining the Mississippi Blues Trail and the Mississippi Country Music Trail. 'We have to put our past in front of us if we're going to put our past behind us," Barbour said. Civil-rights history buffs can soon be guided to, among thirty or so other places, the university where Clyde Kennard applied for admission in the fifties, only to be framed and thrown into jail. They can see where Medgar Evers was shot, in 1963, and where another N.A.A.C.P. leader, Vernon Dahmer, was killed, in 1966, when the Klan firebombed his house. Barbour said that he has also managed to get the legislature to appropriate twenty million dollars for a civil-rights museum in Jackson-there is already such a museum in Birmingham-and he promised that it would be "a sensationally popular attraction." Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the Chicago-reunion organizers had in mind when they wrote, "Mississippi white racists have discovered the millions of dollars that can be derived from tourism pertaining to the legacy of the civil rights movement." Another way to look at it, of course, is as evidence that Mississippi, after half a century, is definitely part of America: it has figured out how to turn its history, even its horrific history, into an industry.
In both Chicago and Jackson, some of those in attendance were carrying around a large book called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders," by Eric Etheridge, one of the organizers of the Jackson commemoration. They were trying to get as many signatures of Freedom Riders as they could. Occasionally, one of them would approach me and say, 'Were you a Freedom Rider?"
"No, I was just a reporter who was on the bus," I'd say.
Some of them insisted that I sign anyway, and eventually I decided that they were probably right in assuming that, after fifty years, the line between reporter and participant was not as bright as I thought it was when I worked in the South. In Chicago, I greeted, say, John Lewis, a sharecropper's son who had grown up to be a congressman, more like an old comrade-in-arms than like someone I'd mentioned in a couple of articles. We had been together at the T railways bus station in Montgomery, where there was a distinct absence of what Chief Pierce called professional courtesy." I'm no longer as certain as I once was about how bright the line was even back then. During Charlayne Hunter's Drst semester at the University of Georgia, she was isolated in a dorm full of hostile coeds, and we spoke on the telephone from time to time. Once, she was talking about an uncomfortable train ride she'd just had from Savannah to Atlanta, and I said that 1'd always heard that the train she'd been on-a well-known train called the Nancy Hanks-was particularly luxurious. “Not where we have to sit," she said. What flashed through my mind had nothing to do with the knowledge I had built up on the subject of segregation in interstate versus intrastate transportation and how long it would take to desegregate the latter. What flashed through my mind was "They can't make her sit back there."
When one of the sessions in Chicago ended with people linking arms and singing 'We Shall Overcome," I made my usual quiet move toward the door. Suddenly, I felt someone lock arms with me. Instinctively, I started to pull my arm away while looking around to see who it was. It was an older woman in a wheelchair. Was I really going to wrest my arm away from an older woman in a wheelchair? I stayed. Then I joined in. It turns out that I still know most of the verses.
The New Yorker, 25 July 2011, p36
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Friendship Has Its Limits
by Erin Biba
Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it-cursor hovering over the Share button-you likely considered how your friends were going to react.
"People are going to like this," you thought. "Maybe I'll even get a few comments." Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? I'm taking bets on the answer. And my money is on never.
Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you're influencing - or trying to influence - how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you've never met. In the end, it isn't who you really are. It's the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn't about having a conversation with people you know. It's about advertising yourself. It's not social; it's media.
Real conversations don't happen in public. You don't go to a party and loudly tell strangers about your recent bout of crippling depression. Or the fact that you just can't seem to trust people enough to make a true connection with a partner. No, the kinds of conversations you have in mixed company are edited for content. You tell people what you think they want to hear.
Mostly that means telling them interesting bits that are designed to make them like you. Like that time you locked yourself out of the house in your pajamas on a rainy night. (You're so funny and humble! We all just love how you can laugh at yourself!) The world of social media is just like that. Even a closed network (like an invitation-only Twitter feed or a private Facebook profile) is a group of people you've decided you want to like you. They don't want to hear about your irritable bowel syndrome. Not now. Not ever.
The idea that we're having a "conversation" online gets even more absurd as your network gets larger. You might have heard of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He's got a number. According to Dunbar, humans are cognitively capable of connecting with only 150 or so people at any given time. In other words, your brain is only big enough to hold personal information about a limited number of people. Everyone else is just noise. Even Facebook agrees with Dunbar, sort of: It doesn't allow users more then 5,000 "friends." The assumption is that once you're linked to that many people, your network is no longer populated by real connections. Your real friend would call you in tears to pick her up from a car accident; your Facebook friend would simply post a photo of her cast and a sad-face emoticon. You feel sorry for her, but you don't experience the panic that comes from witnessing someone's distress firsthand.
Dunbar isn't the only one who believes that managing relationships on a large scale is impossible. In 2009, sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst concluded a long-running study looking at how we manage our real-world social networks. Over the course of seven years, we replace 48 percent of our friends with new ones, Mollenhorst found, though the total number in our network never changes. In other words, there's only so much room for new people in your life. And you're certainly not replacing one of your IRL friends-who actually knows you-with some random person who started following you on Twitter.
Those randoms, by the way, end up being a substantial part of our audience. In a study by UK gadget website Good Mobile Phones, which queried more then 1,500 Facebook users, 60 percent of participants said they no longer knew 20 percent of their "friends," and 50 percent responded that they actually speak with only 20 percent of them. The average Facebook user has only about 130 friends. So, if we're spending most of our time online talking to people we don't even know, how deep can the conversation ever get?
Dan Schawbel, a branding consultant, says we are all constantly building our brands online, whether we like it or not. "The Internet is your permanent record," he says. But while many of your witticisms and clever observations remain for posterity, searchable by Google, the conversations around them are fleeting. The public Twitter replies get replaced by new ones, and comments on your Facebook feed shrink to make room for fresh ones. All that really counted was your initial post and how it affected everyone's opinion of you.
The best evidence that social media isn't really about personal connection? Marketers love it. It seems like every business from taco trucks to GE is hoping to use social media to put a personal face on its brand. The truth is, my personal Twitter feed isn't all that different from @wired, the brand central station of this magazine's social media presence. We both post links to stories we think our followers will like. We both update with anecdotes about people we know. And we both choose our words carefully before we post them to be sure they mesh with how we want the public to perceive us.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It's what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It's another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They're just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.
PS: You should totally follow me on Twitter (@erinbiba). Everyone agrees I'm way more hilarious and adorable there than in real life.
PPS: You can follow my editor on Twitter (@ablackshear). Everyone agrees that he's not that funny or witty.
by Erin Biba
Wired, August 2011, p83
Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it-cursor hovering over the Share button-you likely considered how your friends were going to react.
"People are going to like this," you thought. "Maybe I'll even get a few comments." Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? I'm taking bets on the answer. And my money is on never.
Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you're influencing - or trying to influence - how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you've never met. In the end, it isn't who you really are. It's the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn't about having a conversation with people you know. It's about advertising yourself. It's not social; it's media.
Real conversations don't happen in public. You don't go to a party and loudly tell strangers about your recent bout of crippling depression. Or the fact that you just can't seem to trust people enough to make a true connection with a partner. No, the kinds of conversations you have in mixed company are edited for content. You tell people what you think they want to hear.
Mostly that means telling them interesting bits that are designed to make them like you. Like that time you locked yourself out of the house in your pajamas on a rainy night. (You're so funny and humble! We all just love how you can laugh at yourself!) The world of social media is just like that. Even a closed network (like an invitation-only Twitter feed or a private Facebook profile) is a group of people you've decided you want to like you. They don't want to hear about your irritable bowel syndrome. Not now. Not ever.
The idea that we're having a "conversation" online gets even more absurd as your network gets larger. You might have heard of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He's got a number. According to Dunbar, humans are cognitively capable of connecting with only 150 or so people at any given time. In other words, your brain is only big enough to hold personal information about a limited number of people. Everyone else is just noise. Even Facebook agrees with Dunbar, sort of: It doesn't allow users more then 5,000 "friends." The assumption is that once you're linked to that many people, your network is no longer populated by real connections. Your real friend would call you in tears to pick her up from a car accident; your Facebook friend would simply post a photo of her cast and a sad-face emoticon. You feel sorry for her, but you don't experience the panic that comes from witnessing someone's distress firsthand.
Dunbar isn't the only one who believes that managing relationships on a large scale is impossible. In 2009, sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst concluded a long-running study looking at how we manage our real-world social networks. Over the course of seven years, we replace 48 percent of our friends with new ones, Mollenhorst found, though the total number in our network never changes. In other words, there's only so much room for new people in your life. And you're certainly not replacing one of your IRL friends-who actually knows you-with some random person who started following you on Twitter.
Those randoms, by the way, end up being a substantial part of our audience. In a study by UK gadget website Good Mobile Phones, which queried more then 1,500 Facebook users, 60 percent of participants said they no longer knew 20 percent of their "friends," and 50 percent responded that they actually speak with only 20 percent of them. The average Facebook user has only about 130 friends. So, if we're spending most of our time online talking to people we don't even know, how deep can the conversation ever get?
Dan Schawbel, a branding consultant, says we are all constantly building our brands online, whether we like it or not. "The Internet is your permanent record," he says. But while many of your witticisms and clever observations remain for posterity, searchable by Google, the conversations around them are fleeting. The public Twitter replies get replaced by new ones, and comments on your Facebook feed shrink to make room for fresh ones. All that really counted was your initial post and how it affected everyone's opinion of you.
The best evidence that social media isn't really about personal connection? Marketers love it. It seems like every business from taco trucks to GE is hoping to use social media to put a personal face on its brand. The truth is, my personal Twitter feed isn't all that different from @wired, the brand central station of this magazine's social media presence. We both post links to stories we think our followers will like. We both update with anecdotes about people we know. And we both choose our words carefully before we post them to be sure they mesh with how we want the public to perceive us.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It's what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It's another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They're just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.
PS: You should totally follow me on Twitter (@erinbiba). Everyone agrees I'm way more hilarious and adorable there than in real life.
PPS: You can follow my editor on Twitter (@ablackshear). Everyone agrees that he's not that funny or witty.
by Erin Biba
Wired, August 2011, p83
Friday, July 15, 2011
This Beautiful Life
Written in high-definition prose, Helen Schulman’s new novel, This Beautiful Life (HarperColins), presents every parent’s nightmare. The family quartet of This Beautiful Life is a compact Upper West Side enlightened, progressive nuclear unit. The father, Richard, is a super-competent Mr. Cool; his wife, Elizabeth, is a harried multi-tasker navigating the treacherous lanes of playdates, private school, and competitive motherhood; their children are adopted Chinese daughter Coco and tousled teenager Jake. The house of cards (shown on the cover) symbolically collapses with just one mouse click after a nubile eighth-grader sends Jake a skeevy video, Jake thoughtlessly forwards it to a classmate, and the video goes viral. Before you know it, cultural warfare has broken out and The New York Observer, the New York Post, and Gawker have turner werewolf on everyone involved. Far more intense and specifically observed than any soap opera or morality lesson, This Beautiful Life astringently peels away the panic and dissatisfaction of staying apace in Manhattan’s fast track in the ago of Bloomberg, where maintaining the trappings of success itself becomes a form of serfdom.
review by James Wolcott
Vanity Fair, August 2011, p48
review by James Wolcott
Vanity Fair, August 2011, p48
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Persuader - What Harriet Beecher Stowe wrought
What does it take to persuade—to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they live? We're often told that American society is polarized as never before, with civility in shreds and partisanship so corrosive that government has become nearly inoperable. But this year marks the sesquicentennial of a moment when politics truly failed and the American government splintered. Between 1861 and 1865, Americans did more than hurl verbal brickbats across the political divide; they fired cannons and rifles, killing one another in astonishing numbers. And they did so, in part, because a large number of Americans had been persuaded that they could not live in a country that countenanced slavery.
Slavery had been a contentious issue in the United States from at least the time of its founding. The soaring words of the Declaration of Independence caused many people to pause over the spectacle of humankind being treated like property in the ostensible land of liberty. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, seemed to settle the issue, with compromises written into its text that protected slavery and made Union possible. Some of the most prominent members of the founding generation believed that slavery was a dying institution. Yet the debate after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, and the three-year struggle over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, between 1819 and 1821, discredited such hopes: not only was slavery growing entrenched but the South intended to extend its dominion by carrying it west.
By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.
This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly," one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe's novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" The historian David S. Reynolds, in his passionate "Mightier Than the Sword: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the Battle for America" (Norton; $27.95), answers resoundingly in the affirmative. But the most fascinating part of his lively and perceptive cultural history is the account of how she did it.
Stowe, a deeply religious woman, claimed that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came to her "in visions," that she did not so much write it as receive it from God. But even before the novel was written God helped the process along by having her reared in a family that was the perfect incubator for her talent. Stowe, born on June 14,1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, was the seventh of the nine children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was born two years later. Harriet was five years old when her mother died of tuberculosis; Beecher, a prominent New England minister, remarried and had four more children.
Social reform was the Beecher family business. They produced progressive ministers, educators, writers, and a feminist agitator. Lyman Beecher recognized early on that his daughter Harriet was special, proclaiming her "a great genius" when she was just eight years old. Realizing that her talents might go to waste because of her gender, he wrote that he "would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy 6c Henry a girl—She is as odd—as she is intelligent 6c studious." Reynolds describes young Henry as "tongue-tied" and "seemingly slow," but Lyman Beecher need not have worried about either child. Stowe went on to become hugely influential in one of the few mediums available to women at the time, writing, and Henry Ward Beecher, the tongue-tied boy, became one of the century's most accomplished and celebrated preachers.
Reading and storytelling captivated Stowe from childhood. She read whatever books were available—even old theological tracts, though she found them somewhat tedious. The Arabian Nights provided more thrilling fare, as did Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," a series of stories about the development of Puritan New England. She wrote that they made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's providence."
This Puritan background was essential to Stowe's personality. It wasn't the anti-sex Puritanism of popular legend that gripped her; it was the levelling tradition that, as Reynolds writes, lent support to "radical independence and rebellion against authority." Puritanism in the North, he notes, helped spur "progressive movements against slavery, intemperance, and other social ills"—which is precisely what pro-slavery Southerners found so irritating about it. They thought of New Englanders as "law defying Puritans who endorsed all kinds of disruptive 'isms'— most dangerously, abolitionism."
Stowe's early life was as conventional as that of a member of the Beecher family could be. She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in 1827, but in 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally. Cincinnati was in the Upper South, close to the culture of slavery, and she began to hear stories that would provide templates for her most influential work. In Cincinnati, too, she met Calvin Stowe, whom Lyman Beecher had recruited to the faculty at Lane. Stowe and his wife, Eliza, became great friends with the Beechers. Eliza died in 1834, and two years later Calvin and Harriet married.
The couple had seven children, and Harriet wrote stories to supplement her husband's small income, lamenting, "I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping." When the couple's son Charley died, in 1849, at eighteen months, Stowe began, as Reynolds writes, her "fixation on Jesus Christ as the humble sufferer, the grand symbol of the burdens borne by the lowliest members of society." She explored this theme in a number of short stories and, of course, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," when she portrayed the title character, an enslaved man, as a Christ figure. She said that losing Charley made her understand "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."
Stowe's religious fervor, combined with what she learned about slavery, produced her "visions." Visions and spiritualism were accepted parts of life in nineteenth-century America. Calvin Stowe himself spoke about having had visions of "aerial forms that passed through walls" from the time he was a child. At one point, the couple believed that Calvin's first wife, for whom Harriet had great affection, was communicating with them from beyond the grave. (Both welcomed the intrusions.) The first vision that led to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came in February of 1851. While taking Communion, Reynolds writes, Stowe "saw four figures: an old slave being whipped to death by two fellow slaves, who were goaded on by a brutal white man." The man being whipped would become Uncle Tom. The "brutal white man" would become Simon Legree. The novel that resulted appeared in forty-one weekly installments in a Washington-based anti-slavery newspaper from June, 1851, to March, 1852, when it was published as a book in two volumes.
Stowe said of the book that she had a "vocation to preach on paper," just as the men in her family preached in pulpits. It's a crucial point, because the Beecher men, especially Henry, had helped to modernize the art of preaching. They moved away from sermons that followed a strict trajectory and that discussed doctrine in a routine way. Instead, they relied on narrative. Telling stories from the pulpit made the message of the Gospels more accessible to congregations by using drawn-from-life vignettes, a staple of church services today. Stowe, too, understood how influential narrative could be, and with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, "Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author's views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme."
What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. The novel's two plotlines, Northern and Southern, emphasize slavery's national reach. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters. Along the way, they meet friend and foe, in scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil. The Southern plot centers on Uncle Tom, who, when his owners fall on hard times, is sold "down the river," away from his beloved wife and children. On the trip down, he saves the life of young Eva, prompting her father, Augustine St. Clare, to buy him. Tom and Eva, another of Stowe's Christ figures, become friends. While Eva is dying, St. Clare promises to free Tom but is killed before he can, and Tom falls into the hands of the villainous Simon Legree, with fatal consequences.
Stowe took pains not to demonize all Southerners, or beatify all Northerners. In her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. But her story was effective because it directly assaulted Southern pretensions. Pro-slavery Southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family. The Romans had had slaves, they argued, and the South was a new Rome. (Never mind the absence of the ancient civilization's great architectural, artistic, engineering, legal, and literary achievements.)
Stowe's novel exploded this myth of the South as a land of paternalistic slaveholders. Her description of Tom's sale down the river to the Deep South was an expression of slavery's core reality. The historian Steven Deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. "During this period, slave sales occurred in every southern city and village, and 'coffles' of slaves (gangs held together in chains) could be found on every southern highway, waterway, and railroad," Deyle writes. Without this domestic trade, the institution of slavery would have collapsed. More slaves were sold south than arrived on the North American continent via the infamous Middle Passage. They did not suffer the horrors of a transatlantic ocean voyage packed tight in a ship. But they did suffer the anguish of lost mothers, fathers, children, siblings, husbands, and wives. In what "family," Stowe's book asked, were members treated this way, sold off like cattle by their supposed "kin"?
The sexual mistreatment of enslaved women was a staple of abolitionist literature, and Stowe depicted it with particular force. The modesty of the age, however, allowed slavery's apologists to cast any who raised the subject as tasteless and crude. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson's eldest grandson, wrote with bitterness about Stowe in his late-in-life unpublished memoirs, and explicitly sought to equate the entire work with sordid sex:
Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's log cabin is a foul and atrocious Libel upon the slave holders of the Southern States, and was a garbage suited to the appetite of sectional hate. As true as if the description of the morals of New York, had been drawn from the five points or of Boston from its brothels.
Stowe's narrative was persuasive, however, because it fit with what many Americans were able to glean from their travels and knew from their experience of human nature. (What was the likely result of giving males control over the bodies of women who cannot say no to them?) Meanwhile, the Fugitive Slave Law made Northerners—by requiring them to return escaped slaves— an active part of slavery. It was harder to avoid the moral consequences of a system that all Americans were now being asked to allow to spread into the western part of the continent. In effect, Stowe raised with fellow-citizens the question she had asked herself: "This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country?" In the decade following the novel's publication, a growing segment of the population decided that it could not, even if it meant going to war.
Uncle Tom's Cabin" was the pinnacle of Stowe's literary career, but it was not the end of it. In addition to publishing, in 1853, "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," essentially a reply to white Southerners' charge that she had misrepresented the facts of slavery, she wrote Biblical stories, children's books, and travelogues. She died of a stroke in 1896, still a much honored figure. But "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had long since developed a life beyond the novel. Reynolds details the explosion of tie-ins, including "a host of merchandise known as Tomitudes" (everything from biscuit tins and earthenware plates to card games and snuffboxes), and the rise of wildly popular "Tom shows," stage adaptations of the book. Versions of the play which appeared in the eighteen-fifties remained largely true to Stowe's original, and were hugely influential in turning many working-class whites—historically hostile to blacks, with whom they felt in competition as laborers—against slavery. Not surprisingly, however, there were major changes in the plays during and after Reconstruction. Reynolds tells us that during the eigh-teen-eighties as many as fifty Tom troupes were touring the states, and that by the eighteen-nineties there were as many as five hundred. As the troupes grew in number, they began to display the American tendency toward excess, what Reynolds calls the " '-est' factor, a fascination with the biggest, smallest, thinnest, oldest, and most outrageous, which reflected the bumptious confidence of the rapidly expanding nation."
Real bloodhounds, with what Reynolds describes as their "droopy ears and soft expressions," did not provide enough drama for the chase scenes, so fiercer dogs were brought in. Some shows featured alligators and at least one elephant. P. T. Barnum got into the act and, when he merged with J. A. Bailey's circus, added the most bizarre twist: duplicate characters for each role, from Little Eva to Simon Legree. "Everything double but the prices!" one poster declared. That, as it turned out, was not enough for audiences, and some shows soon advertised three or four of each. Then there were productions with boxing matches interspersed: Uncle Tom would step out of character and go three rounds with another actor before returning to the play. The iconic characters Stowe created kept a powerful hold on the public consciousness, but they also became caricatures, their original proportions distorted.
Reynolds describes, with somewhat less power than in the early chapters, how the novel and its protagonists continued to transfix the public well into the twentieth century. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" influenced revolutionary movements around the globe, even as effective counter-narratives arose. D. W. Griffith, a consummate storyteller, began Hollywood's love affair with the romantic version of the white South in his groundbreaking film "The Birth of a Nation"; "Gone with the Wind" continued the tradition, portraying the South as a gracious land of happy slaves—with no hint of the endemic cruelty of American slavery.
Changing sensibilities about race also took a toll on the novel's prestige. James Baldwin excoriated Stowe in his 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," not least for her depiction of Uncle Tom as a Christ figure, suffering and dying at the hands of Simon Legree. Baldwin objected to the suggestion that blacks be passive in the face of white violence. In the coming decade, of course, black civil-rights leaders would decide to do just that as they sought to destroy Jim Crow in the South, and Baldwin would later write protest novels of his own.
In the past two decades, historians and literary critics have started to look at "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from the perspective of gender, keeping in mind how difficult it has been, and still is, for women's writing to be taken as seriously as men's. Jane Smiley, in a controversial essay, asked why Stowe's novel has been more harshly treated than works written by men which are just as dated and offensive in their treatment of race, notably "Huckleberry Finn." Reynolds himself takes on those who would minimize Stowe's influence because she was, as they suppose, a cultural rather than a political figure. Politics narrowly defined—who got voted into office, who wrote and voted on the bill, who belonged to this or that political club—leaves out an enormous amount. For one thing, it leaves out half the population, since for most of American history women were excluded from the direct exercise of political power.
That cultural life matters isn't merely an insight from the new social history. Lincoln explained it as well as anyone: "He who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes." As a woman, Stowe had no hope of making a statute. But, like Lincoln, she understood how change is effected in society, and she used what tools she had, offering a new narrative—she might say a new "vision"—that was explicitly moral and, in that sense, extra-legal: beyond the calculus of power and interest, and firmly in the realm of right and wrong. The novel's overtly religious appeal to the reader, sometimes cringe-inducing portrayal of blacks, and unabashed sentimentality may grate upon modern sensibilities. But Stowe knew things—heard things, saw things—that we, thanks in part to her, will never be forced to confront: American slavery as it was. Arguments will continue about the novel's literary value and about her handling of race. For all that, it's still possible to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for what its author intended it to be: a cri de coeur to the American people, one that forced them to ask what kind of country they wanted their nation to be. Fortunately, Stowe's answer to the question was persuasive.
review by Annette Gordon-Reed
New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011, p.120
Slavery had been a contentious issue in the United States from at least the time of its founding. The soaring words of the Declaration of Independence caused many people to pause over the spectacle of humankind being treated like property in the ostensible land of liberty. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, seemed to settle the issue, with compromises written into its text that protected slavery and made Union possible. Some of the most prominent members of the founding generation believed that slavery was a dying institution. Yet the debate after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, and the three-year struggle over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, between 1819 and 1821, discredited such hopes: not only was slavery growing entrenched but the South intended to extend its dominion by carrying it west.
By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.
This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly," one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe's novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" The historian David S. Reynolds, in his passionate "Mightier Than the Sword: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the Battle for America" (Norton; $27.95), answers resoundingly in the affirmative. But the most fascinating part of his lively and perceptive cultural history is the account of how she did it.
Stowe, a deeply religious woman, claimed that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came to her "in visions," that she did not so much write it as receive it from God. But even before the novel was written God helped the process along by having her reared in a family that was the perfect incubator for her talent. Stowe, born on June 14,1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, was the seventh of the nine children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was born two years later. Harriet was five years old when her mother died of tuberculosis; Beecher, a prominent New England minister, remarried and had four more children.
Social reform was the Beecher family business. They produced progressive ministers, educators, writers, and a feminist agitator. Lyman Beecher recognized early on that his daughter Harriet was special, proclaiming her "a great genius" when she was just eight years old. Realizing that her talents might go to waste because of her gender, he wrote that he "would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy 6c Henry a girl—She is as odd—as she is intelligent 6c studious." Reynolds describes young Henry as "tongue-tied" and "seemingly slow," but Lyman Beecher need not have worried about either child. Stowe went on to become hugely influential in one of the few mediums available to women at the time, writing, and Henry Ward Beecher, the tongue-tied boy, became one of the century's most accomplished and celebrated preachers.
Reading and storytelling captivated Stowe from childhood. She read whatever books were available—even old theological tracts, though she found them somewhat tedious. The Arabian Nights provided more thrilling fare, as did Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," a series of stories about the development of Puritan New England. She wrote that they made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's providence."
This Puritan background was essential to Stowe's personality. It wasn't the anti-sex Puritanism of popular legend that gripped her; it was the levelling tradition that, as Reynolds writes, lent support to "radical independence and rebellion against authority." Puritanism in the North, he notes, helped spur "progressive movements against slavery, intemperance, and other social ills"—which is precisely what pro-slavery Southerners found so irritating about it. They thought of New Englanders as "law defying Puritans who endorsed all kinds of disruptive 'isms'— most dangerously, abolitionism."
Stowe's early life was as conventional as that of a member of the Beecher family could be. She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in 1827, but in 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally. Cincinnati was in the Upper South, close to the culture of slavery, and she began to hear stories that would provide templates for her most influential work. In Cincinnati, too, she met Calvin Stowe, whom Lyman Beecher had recruited to the faculty at Lane. Stowe and his wife, Eliza, became great friends with the Beechers. Eliza died in 1834, and two years later Calvin and Harriet married.
The couple had seven children, and Harriet wrote stories to supplement her husband's small income, lamenting, "I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping." When the couple's son Charley died, in 1849, at eighteen months, Stowe began, as Reynolds writes, her "fixation on Jesus Christ as the humble sufferer, the grand symbol of the burdens borne by the lowliest members of society." She explored this theme in a number of short stories and, of course, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," when she portrayed the title character, an enslaved man, as a Christ figure. She said that losing Charley made her understand "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."
Stowe's religious fervor, combined with what she learned about slavery, produced her "visions." Visions and spiritualism were accepted parts of life in nineteenth-century America. Calvin Stowe himself spoke about having had visions of "aerial forms that passed through walls" from the time he was a child. At one point, the couple believed that Calvin's first wife, for whom Harriet had great affection, was communicating with them from beyond the grave. (Both welcomed the intrusions.) The first vision that led to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came in February of 1851. While taking Communion, Reynolds writes, Stowe "saw four figures: an old slave being whipped to death by two fellow slaves, who were goaded on by a brutal white man." The man being whipped would become Uncle Tom. The "brutal white man" would become Simon Legree. The novel that resulted appeared in forty-one weekly installments in a Washington-based anti-slavery newspaper from June, 1851, to March, 1852, when it was published as a book in two volumes.
Stowe said of the book that she had a "vocation to preach on paper," just as the men in her family preached in pulpits. It's a crucial point, because the Beecher men, especially Henry, had helped to modernize the art of preaching. They moved away from sermons that followed a strict trajectory and that discussed doctrine in a routine way. Instead, they relied on narrative. Telling stories from the pulpit made the message of the Gospels more accessible to congregations by using drawn-from-life vignettes, a staple of church services today. Stowe, too, understood how influential narrative could be, and with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, "Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author's views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme."
What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. The novel's two plotlines, Northern and Southern, emphasize slavery's national reach. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters. Along the way, they meet friend and foe, in scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil. The Southern plot centers on Uncle Tom, who, when his owners fall on hard times, is sold "down the river," away from his beloved wife and children. On the trip down, he saves the life of young Eva, prompting her father, Augustine St. Clare, to buy him. Tom and Eva, another of Stowe's Christ figures, become friends. While Eva is dying, St. Clare promises to free Tom but is killed before he can, and Tom falls into the hands of the villainous Simon Legree, with fatal consequences.
Stowe took pains not to demonize all Southerners, or beatify all Northerners. In her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. But her story was effective because it directly assaulted Southern pretensions. Pro-slavery Southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family. The Romans had had slaves, they argued, and the South was a new Rome. (Never mind the absence of the ancient civilization's great architectural, artistic, engineering, legal, and literary achievements.)
Stowe's novel exploded this myth of the South as a land of paternalistic slaveholders. Her description of Tom's sale down the river to the Deep South was an expression of slavery's core reality. The historian Steven Deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. "During this period, slave sales occurred in every southern city and village, and 'coffles' of slaves (gangs held together in chains) could be found on every southern highway, waterway, and railroad," Deyle writes. Without this domestic trade, the institution of slavery would have collapsed. More slaves were sold south than arrived on the North American continent via the infamous Middle Passage. They did not suffer the horrors of a transatlantic ocean voyage packed tight in a ship. But they did suffer the anguish of lost mothers, fathers, children, siblings, husbands, and wives. In what "family," Stowe's book asked, were members treated this way, sold off like cattle by their supposed "kin"?
The sexual mistreatment of enslaved women was a staple of abolitionist literature, and Stowe depicted it with particular force. The modesty of the age, however, allowed slavery's apologists to cast any who raised the subject as tasteless and crude. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson's eldest grandson, wrote with bitterness about Stowe in his late-in-life unpublished memoirs, and explicitly sought to equate the entire work with sordid sex:
Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's log cabin is a foul and atrocious Libel upon the slave holders of the Southern States, and was a garbage suited to the appetite of sectional hate. As true as if the description of the morals of New York, had been drawn from the five points or of Boston from its brothels.
Stowe's narrative was persuasive, however, because it fit with what many Americans were able to glean from their travels and knew from their experience of human nature. (What was the likely result of giving males control over the bodies of women who cannot say no to them?) Meanwhile, the Fugitive Slave Law made Northerners—by requiring them to return escaped slaves— an active part of slavery. It was harder to avoid the moral consequences of a system that all Americans were now being asked to allow to spread into the western part of the continent. In effect, Stowe raised with fellow-citizens the question she had asked herself: "This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country?" In the decade following the novel's publication, a growing segment of the population decided that it could not, even if it meant going to war.
Uncle Tom's Cabin" was the pinnacle of Stowe's literary career, but it was not the end of it. In addition to publishing, in 1853, "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," essentially a reply to white Southerners' charge that she had misrepresented the facts of slavery, she wrote Biblical stories, children's books, and travelogues. She died of a stroke in 1896, still a much honored figure. But "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had long since developed a life beyond the novel. Reynolds details the explosion of tie-ins, including "a host of merchandise known as Tomitudes" (everything from biscuit tins and earthenware plates to card games and snuffboxes), and the rise of wildly popular "Tom shows," stage adaptations of the book. Versions of the play which appeared in the eighteen-fifties remained largely true to Stowe's original, and were hugely influential in turning many working-class whites—historically hostile to blacks, with whom they felt in competition as laborers—against slavery. Not surprisingly, however, there were major changes in the plays during and after Reconstruction. Reynolds tells us that during the eigh-teen-eighties as many as fifty Tom troupes were touring the states, and that by the eighteen-nineties there were as many as five hundred. As the troupes grew in number, they began to display the American tendency toward excess, what Reynolds calls the " '-est' factor, a fascination with the biggest, smallest, thinnest, oldest, and most outrageous, which reflected the bumptious confidence of the rapidly expanding nation."
Real bloodhounds, with what Reynolds describes as their "droopy ears and soft expressions," did not provide enough drama for the chase scenes, so fiercer dogs were brought in. Some shows featured alligators and at least one elephant. P. T. Barnum got into the act and, when he merged with J. A. Bailey's circus, added the most bizarre twist: duplicate characters for each role, from Little Eva to Simon Legree. "Everything double but the prices!" one poster declared. That, as it turned out, was not enough for audiences, and some shows soon advertised three or four of each. Then there were productions with boxing matches interspersed: Uncle Tom would step out of character and go three rounds with another actor before returning to the play. The iconic characters Stowe created kept a powerful hold on the public consciousness, but they also became caricatures, their original proportions distorted.
Reynolds describes, with somewhat less power than in the early chapters, how the novel and its protagonists continued to transfix the public well into the twentieth century. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" influenced revolutionary movements around the globe, even as effective counter-narratives arose. D. W. Griffith, a consummate storyteller, began Hollywood's love affair with the romantic version of the white South in his groundbreaking film "The Birth of a Nation"; "Gone with the Wind" continued the tradition, portraying the South as a gracious land of happy slaves—with no hint of the endemic cruelty of American slavery.
Changing sensibilities about race also took a toll on the novel's prestige. James Baldwin excoriated Stowe in his 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," not least for her depiction of Uncle Tom as a Christ figure, suffering and dying at the hands of Simon Legree. Baldwin objected to the suggestion that blacks be passive in the face of white violence. In the coming decade, of course, black civil-rights leaders would decide to do just that as they sought to destroy Jim Crow in the South, and Baldwin would later write protest novels of his own.
In the past two decades, historians and literary critics have started to look at "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from the perspective of gender, keeping in mind how difficult it has been, and still is, for women's writing to be taken as seriously as men's. Jane Smiley, in a controversial essay, asked why Stowe's novel has been more harshly treated than works written by men which are just as dated and offensive in their treatment of race, notably "Huckleberry Finn." Reynolds himself takes on those who would minimize Stowe's influence because she was, as they suppose, a cultural rather than a political figure. Politics narrowly defined—who got voted into office, who wrote and voted on the bill, who belonged to this or that political club—leaves out an enormous amount. For one thing, it leaves out half the population, since for most of American history women were excluded from the direct exercise of political power.
That cultural life matters isn't merely an insight from the new social history. Lincoln explained it as well as anyone: "He who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes." As a woman, Stowe had no hope of making a statute. But, like Lincoln, she understood how change is effected in society, and she used what tools she had, offering a new narrative—she might say a new "vision"—that was explicitly moral and, in that sense, extra-legal: beyond the calculus of power and interest, and firmly in the realm of right and wrong. The novel's overtly religious appeal to the reader, sometimes cringe-inducing portrayal of blacks, and unabashed sentimentality may grate upon modern sensibilities. But Stowe knew things—heard things, saw things—that we, thanks in part to her, will never be forced to confront: American slavery as it was. Arguments will continue about the novel's literary value and about her handling of race. For all that, it's still possible to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for what its author intended it to be: a cri de coeur to the American people, one that forced them to ask what kind of country they wanted their nation to be. Fortunately, Stowe's answer to the question was persuasive.
review by Annette Gordon-Reed
New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011, p.120
IKEA’s little secret (!!?!!)
In Sweden, IKEA's factory workers are paid $19 per hour and get five weeks of paid vacation every year. In America? Not so much.
IKEA's Swedwood plant in Danville, Virginia is the most dangerous plant in the wood furniture industry -- workers there have suffered more than 1,536 days of lost work due to accidents on the job in a 30-month period. According to the LA Times, IKEA's Danville workers are paid as little as $8 an hour and face racial discrimination from their managers. Workers often find out on Friday night that they'll be forced to work for the entire weekend -- and if they can't make it, they face disciplinary action.
In Sweden, IKEA's factory workers are unionized, which is one reason they receive better wages and have a safer workplace -- but the company is going all out to prevent American workers from receiving those same rights and protections. Please sign the petition to tell IKEA to give its American workers the freedom to organize.
The workers in Danville have filed for an election to start a union of their own -- the election could come as soon as six weeks from now. But rather than pay its workers fair wages, Swedwood pays the notorious union-busting firm Jackson Lewis thousands of dollars a day to hold mandatory "captive audience meetings" with the Danville workers. At these meetings, the Jackson Lewis associates inundate the workers with anti-union propaganda and veiled threats that are backed up with random firings.
Here's the good news: The publicity surrounding this organizing drive has already made a difference -- last month, Swedwood announced that Danville workers would no longer be forced to work mandatory overtime. But Liz Cattaneo of American Rights at Work stresses that continued public pressure is extremely important: "If IKEA thinks the public isn't paying attention, they're going to play hardball … throughout the election process - which could mean more firings and more union busting."
Now that the workers have filed for a union election, you can bet IKEA will redouble its efforts to squash their rights. They need our support now more than ever.
Please sign the petition to tell IKEA's head of Corporate PR that we are paying attention, and we expect IKEA to treat its American workers just as well as its Swedish workers:
http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-ikea-to-respect-its-workers
IKEA's Swedwood plant in Danville, Virginia is the most dangerous plant in the wood furniture industry -- workers there have suffered more than 1,536 days of lost work due to accidents on the job in a 30-month period. According to the LA Times, IKEA's Danville workers are paid as little as $8 an hour and face racial discrimination from their managers. Workers often find out on Friday night that they'll be forced to work for the entire weekend -- and if they can't make it, they face disciplinary action.
In Sweden, IKEA's factory workers are unionized, which is one reason they receive better wages and have a safer workplace -- but the company is going all out to prevent American workers from receiving those same rights and protections. Please sign the petition to tell IKEA to give its American workers the freedom to organize.
The workers in Danville have filed for an election to start a union of their own -- the election could come as soon as six weeks from now. But rather than pay its workers fair wages, Swedwood pays the notorious union-busting firm Jackson Lewis thousands of dollars a day to hold mandatory "captive audience meetings" with the Danville workers. At these meetings, the Jackson Lewis associates inundate the workers with anti-union propaganda and veiled threats that are backed up with random firings.
Here's the good news: The publicity surrounding this organizing drive has already made a difference -- last month, Swedwood announced that Danville workers would no longer be forced to work mandatory overtime. But Liz Cattaneo of American Rights at Work stresses that continued public pressure is extremely important: "If IKEA thinks the public isn't paying attention, they're going to play hardball … throughout the election process - which could mean more firings and more union busting."
Now that the workers have filed for a union election, you can bet IKEA will redouble its efforts to squash their rights. They need our support now more than ever.
Please sign the petition to tell IKEA's head of Corporate PR that we are paying attention, and we expect IKEA to treat its American workers just as well as its Swedish workers:
http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-ikea-to-respect-its-workers
True/False: Turkey bacon is more nutritious than pork
FALSE: the hefty salt and fat found in some turkey bacon negate its positives. Bacon is a prime example of why label-reading is important. Pork bacon comes in smoky, super-thick, fatty slabs but also in naturally leaner center-cut slices; the latter can contain as little as 60 calories, 1.5g sat fat, and 260mg sodium per slice. Turkey bacon also wanders all over the nutrition map. A slice of Jennie-O’s ultra-lean version is a nutrition bargain, at 20 calories, 0g sat fat, and 120mg sodium. But others can contain the same sat fat as center-cut pork bacon – and even more sodium.
WHAT TO DO: If you like pork, choose a lean, high-flavor cut. If you need less fat, find a lean, lower-sodium turkey product.
source: Cooking Light, July 2011, p.99
WHAT TO DO: If you like pork, choose a lean, high-flavor cut. If you need less fat, find a lean, lower-sodium turkey product.
source: Cooking Light, July 2011, p.99
Friday, June 24, 2011
Lacrimosa
Lacrimosa dies illa,
qua resurget ex favilla
judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus,
pie Jesu Domine,
dona eis requiem.
qua resurget ex favilla
judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus,
pie Jesu Domine,
dona eis requiem.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Help your kids reach their potential
Consider the benefits of California's official 529 College Savings Plan
The ScholarShare College Savings Plan can help give you a way to create a careful, consistently maintained college savings strategy. All your earnings are federal and California State income tax free when used for qualified higher education expenses, which may make a substantial difference when it comes time to pay for tuition, books, and room and board.
Consider opening a ScholarShare Plan Account
What do you get with a ScholarShare Plan?
* Tax advantages can help you save more Automatic contributions as low as $15 per month*
* Flexible investment options including age-based portfolios
* Savings can be used at colleges nationwide
* Guidance from Fidelity to help keep you on track
Call 800.544.5248 or visit ScholarShare.com/CAsaves to get all of the benefits of California's official 529 College Savings Plan.
Carolyn M. Clancy
Executive Vice President
Personal and Workplace Investing Services
Fidelity Investments
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC
Zeny Marie Agullana
Executive Director
ScholarShare Investment Board
Guidance provided by Fidelity is educational in nature, is not individualized, and is not intended to serve as the primary or sole basis for your investment or tax-planning decisions.
Please carefully consider the Plan's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. Contact Fidelity for a free Fact Kit, or view one online. Read it carefully before you invest.
The ScholarShare College Savings Plan is offered by the ScholarShare Investment Board, an agency of the State of California, and managed by Fidelity Investments. If you or the designated beneficiary is not a California resident, you may want to consider, before investing, whether your state or the beneficiary's home state offers its residents a plan with alternate state tax advantages or other benefits.
Neither the principal deposited nor the investment return is guaranteed by the State of California, the ScholarShare Investment Board, Fidelity Investments or any affiliate thereof, or the federal government or any agency thereof.
Units of the Portfolios are municipal securities and may be subject to market volatility and fluctuation.
* Periodic investment plans do not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss in a declining market.
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC, 900 Salem Street, Smithfield, RI 02917
The ScholarShare College Savings Plan can help give you a way to create a careful, consistently maintained college savings strategy. All your earnings are federal and California State income tax free when used for qualified higher education expenses, which may make a substantial difference when it comes time to pay for tuition, books, and room and board.
Consider opening a ScholarShare Plan Account
What do you get with a ScholarShare Plan?
* Tax advantages can help you save more Automatic contributions as low as $15 per month*
* Flexible investment options including age-based portfolios
* Savings can be used at colleges nationwide
* Guidance from Fidelity to help keep you on track
Call 800.544.5248 or visit ScholarShare.com/CAsaves to get all of the benefits of California's official 529 College Savings Plan.
Carolyn M. Clancy
Executive Vice President
Personal and Workplace Investing Services
Fidelity Investments
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC
Zeny Marie Agullana
Executive Director
ScholarShare Investment Board
Guidance provided by Fidelity is educational in nature, is not individualized, and is not intended to serve as the primary or sole basis for your investment or tax-planning decisions.
Please carefully consider the Plan's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. Contact Fidelity for a free Fact Kit, or view one online. Read it carefully before you invest.
The ScholarShare College Savings Plan is offered by the ScholarShare Investment Board, an agency of the State of California, and managed by Fidelity Investments. If you or the designated beneficiary is not a California resident, you may want to consider, before investing, whether your state or the beneficiary's home state offers its residents a plan with alternate state tax advantages or other benefits.
Neither the principal deposited nor the investment return is guaranteed by the State of California, the ScholarShare Investment Board, Fidelity Investments or any affiliate thereof, or the federal government or any agency thereof.
Units of the Portfolios are municipal securities and may be subject to market volatility and fluctuation.
* Periodic investment plans do not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss in a declining market.
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC, 900 Salem Street, Smithfield, RI 02917
The Futility of Rooftop Solar Panels
Q: Lithium and other batteries are some of the great 21st-century technologies, and China as made them a priority in a way the US hasn't. Do you think the US can compete?
A: The current lithium technology was invented by a guy at the University of Texas; innovative battery companies are overwhelmingly here in the US. There are several that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla backs. There are people like Donald Sado way at MIT, whom I back directly. I think if you want a leading indicator that you can feel good about, look at the amount of IQ working on energy today and the kinds of tools those smart people have to communicate and to create simulations. Compared to 20 years ago, it's night and day. In terms of innovation IQ and risk taking and starting up new companies, the US blows everybody else away.
You could have the government throw money at the most politically favored guy in the country to go build a battery factory. And there are billions of dollars that have been assigned to that waste. Or you could actually back people who have better battery ideas.
You have to think of two types of batteries. One is a battery for a car, and it has to be light and crash-proof, but the total amount of energy it has to store is not all that large. Now, that doesn't give you an environmental benefit unless your grid has somehow changed. But at least it gives you a security benefit, because you're sourcing your coal for your grid locally. The harder battery problem is the second type-the battery. If you're getting, say, 50 percent of your energy from solar, and the sun only shines during the day, then you have to be storing enough energy for the night. And that is a mind-blowing problem. I mean, that's more demanding by a factor of a hundred than any other battery challenge we have today.
I think people deeply underestimate what a huge problem this day-night issue is if you're trying to design an energy system involving solar technology that's more than just a hobby. You know, the sun shines during the day, and people turn their air conditioners on during the day, so you can catch some of that peaking load, particularly if you get enough subsidies. It's cute, you know; it's nice. But the economics are so, so far from making sense. And yet that's where subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment- this is true in Europe and the United States-not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of basic research.
Interview with Bill Gates by Wired Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson
Wired, July 2011, p.108
A: The current lithium technology was invented by a guy at the University of Texas; innovative battery companies are overwhelmingly here in the US. There are several that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla backs. There are people like Donald Sado way at MIT, whom I back directly. I think if you want a leading indicator that you can feel good about, look at the amount of IQ working on energy today and the kinds of tools those smart people have to communicate and to create simulations. Compared to 20 years ago, it's night and day. In terms of innovation IQ and risk taking and starting up new companies, the US blows everybody else away.
You could have the government throw money at the most politically favored guy in the country to go build a battery factory. And there are billions of dollars that have been assigned to that waste. Or you could actually back people who have better battery ideas.
You have to think of two types of batteries. One is a battery for a car, and it has to be light and crash-proof, but the total amount of energy it has to store is not all that large. Now, that doesn't give you an environmental benefit unless your grid has somehow changed. But at least it gives you a security benefit, because you're sourcing your coal for your grid locally. The harder battery problem is the second type-the battery. If you're getting, say, 50 percent of your energy from solar, and the sun only shines during the day, then you have to be storing enough energy for the night. And that is a mind-blowing problem. I mean, that's more demanding by a factor of a hundred than any other battery challenge we have today.
I think people deeply underestimate what a huge problem this day-night issue is if you're trying to design an energy system involving solar technology that's more than just a hobby. You know, the sun shines during the day, and people turn their air conditioners on during the day, so you can catch some of that peaking load, particularly if you get enough subsidies. It's cute, you know; it's nice. But the economics are so, so far from making sense. And yet that's where subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment- this is true in Europe and the United States-not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of basic research.
Interview with Bill Gates by Wired Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson
Wired, July 2011, p.108
Thursday, June 16, 2011
NAACP Honors Clarence Mitchell, Jr.
Living in the 21st century, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Some are well known. Others seem to disappear from the pages of history. One of those giants whose name has faded from recent memory is Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. (1911-1984).Nicknamed the 101st senator by colleagues on Capitol Hill, Mitchell led the fight for justice and equality as a lobbyist for the NAACP. As chief of the Washington Bureau from 1950 to 1978, his work in building relationships on both sides of the aisle led to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded Mitchell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country.
According to current Washington Bureau Chief and lobbyist, Hilary O. Shelton, anyone who works in the interest of justice and equality owes a debt of gratitude to Mitchell. He is not a household name among civil rights pioneers, Shelton notes, because he often worked diligently behind the scenes.
"Even though he has been gone from the position for over 30 years, people know him on Capitol Hill," Shelton said.
Mitchell's responsibility was to advocate for the NAACP's civil rights legislative agenda to Congress, the White House and government agencies, Shelton said. Mitchell walked a tightrope for decades, striking a delicate balance of persistence and humility in order to make inroads across party lines and in the face of hostility. He registered to vote as an independent so as not to appear biased toward either party. At the time he took the job, most Blacks in the U.S. identified with the Republican Party and notorious segregationists Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms were Dixiecrats.
According to his son, Michael, Mitchell started out with aspirations of becoming a physician. Upon graduating from Lincoln University in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, Mitchell took a job with the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper to make ends meet. After covering a lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Mitchell was compelled to answer the call to justice.
Mitchell's relative obscurity is the reason two native Baltimoreans took it upon themselves to make sure that the man, his work and his legacy were acknowledged on what would have been his 100th birthday. Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, immediate past president of the Baltimore City NAACP chapter, and Michael Johnson, director of the Paul Robeson Institute, collaborated to not only recognize, but also to educate people about the work of native son Mitchell.
"When you look at civil rights and voting rights and housing - if it wasn't for him, none of those bills would've passed," said Cheatham. According to Cheatham, Morgan State University was able to survive because of Mitchell's support. He also helped secure an engineering school on the college campus, which now bears his name. The main courthouse in Baltimore as well as an admissions building at the University of Maryland are also named for Mitchell.
Civil rights was a family affair. Mitchell's wife, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, established the youth component of the NAACP and was the first Black woman to practice law in Maryland. Mitchell's mother-in-law, Lillie M. Carroll Jackson, established the Baltimore City NAACP chapter and presided over the largest NAACP chapter from 1935 to 1970.
The weeklong centennial celebration honoring Mitchell's life included an educational program for students in Baltimore City public schools, a panel discussion, church services and a discussion with Prof. Denton L. Watson, author of Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell Jr. 's Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws. The celebration culminated with a birthday breakfast on March 8 featuring Shelton as the keynote speaker and a tour of the Clarence Mitchell Jr. courthouse in Baltimore.
NAACP Maryland State Conference President Gerald Stansbury acknowledged Mitchell's lasting legacy. "I think it's amazing that his whole family had a legacy of activism," said Stansbury. "He was a freedom fighter. I think the NAACP was very fortunate to have [Mitchell] be a part of it."
by Cindy Barnes-Thomas
reprinted from Spring 2011, The Crisis, p41
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
1012 Natchez
review by Eisa Ulen
Nioki McElroy has published a memoir that often reads like a personal testimony brought on during an ordinary conversation with an elder eager to share her true-life tales. A PhD. who has not attended Wintergreen but who also chose to share her personal narrative with readers, McElroy bears witness to her own life in 1012 Natchez: A Memoir of Grace, Hardship, and Love.
By telling what she saw, and how she saw it, as she came of age, married and started her family in the mid-20th century, McElroy resists the silencing of Black women who experience America differently than the mainstream - even when those Black women become university professors.
When she writes about the beginning of her husband's "own Black consciousness that defined the man he was to become," for example, she also testifies to the state of public affairs affecting countless Black people who were never given the opportunity to write their truths:
"Mac attended Chicago Public School System for grade school in the 1920s and '30s. The schools were segregated - his classmates were Black and the teachers were White. Black teachers were rare since very few Blacks were admitted to Chicago Teachers College, where teachers received their training at that time ... Mac never forgot the way he felt during the year when a disinterested White teacher never bothered to learn his name."McElroy also remembers and tells of the May 1930 lynching of George Hughes, one of too many Black men who were never given a fair trial for the alleged crime of assaulting a White woman, and whose stories of injustice are still insufficiently documented.
McElroy helps continue the work started by campaigner Ida B. Wells when she recounts not only Hughes' lynching, but also the riot that followed - a riot that destroyed the most prosperous sections of a small African American community under siege by hostile Whites. McElroy's work is accessible and her prose is often conversational, creating a tone that is familiar in its frank recounting of the past. I wish the book were longer, that the author had more fully developed some of her ideas and filled in some narrative holes. Nevertheless, McElroy's specific experience in a world dominated by wealth, manhood, and Whiteness belongs to all Black women who struggle to maintain an authentic identity in American society.
------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34
Nioki McElroy has published a memoir that often reads like a personal testimony brought on during an ordinary conversation with an elder eager to share her true-life tales. A PhD. who has not attended Wintergreen but who also chose to share her personal narrative with readers, McElroy bears witness to her own life in 1012 Natchez: A Memoir of Grace, Hardship, and Love.
By telling what she saw, and how she saw it, as she came of age, married and started her family in the mid-20th century, McElroy resists the silencing of Black women who experience America differently than the mainstream - even when those Black women become university professors.
When she writes about the beginning of her husband's "own Black consciousness that defined the man he was to become," for example, she also testifies to the state of public affairs affecting countless Black people who were never given the opportunity to write their truths:
"Mac attended Chicago Public School System for grade school in the 1920s and '30s. The schools were segregated - his classmates were Black and the teachers were White. Black teachers were rare since very few Blacks were admitted to Chicago Teachers College, where teachers received their training at that time ... Mac never forgot the way he felt during the year when a disinterested White teacher never bothered to learn his name."McElroy also remembers and tells of the May 1930 lynching of George Hughes, one of too many Black men who were never given a fair trial for the alleged crime of assaulting a White woman, and whose stories of injustice are still insufficiently documented.
McElroy helps continue the work started by campaigner Ida B. Wells when she recounts not only Hughes' lynching, but also the riot that followed - a riot that destroyed the most prosperous sections of a small African American community under siege by hostile Whites. McElroy's work is accessible and her prose is often conversational, creating a tone that is familiar in its frank recounting of the past. I wish the book were longer, that the author had more fully developed some of her ideas and filled in some narrative holes. Nevertheless, McElroy's specific experience in a world dominated by wealth, manhood, and Whiteness belongs to all Black women who struggle to maintain an authentic identity in American society.
------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34
Circle of Sisters Bearing Words, Bearing Witness
Review by Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Through their work, literary, ambitious Black women writers remember and tell. They bear witness to their lives and the lives of other African Americans. Whether they are crafting fiction or nonfiction, these women tell truths - not one truth, but the many truths that together form the diverse experiences of Black American womanhood. Two books, one a memoir and the other a collection of short essays by Black women writers, work in this tradition. Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers, edited by Joanne Veal Gabbin, is an anthology of first-person essays crafted by academicians.
According to these sisters, the Ivory Tower has historically been hostile to the presence of Black women educators. In response to consistent subjugation and" othering" by the dominant gaze of their less-than-collegial university colleagues, these women come together to gaze lovingly upon each other at a regular retreat established by Gabbin called the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective.
In the first essay of the collection, "A Distant Star Called Possibility," Nikki Giovanni says this about Wintergreen:
"We played cards, swam,
walked in the woods (dodging the bears),
read poetry to the group,
cooked and ate,
and it was great.
It was supposed to be a onetime thing,
but we all said: Let's do it again.
And we have been doing it for the last twenty years ...
It is a safe place.
To relax.
To be surrounded by love.
To be.
A haven.
Where we cheer each other on...
riding the night winds,
our hearts skip across the clouds,
coming to rest on a distant star called possibility;
we arrive at Wintergreen.
Good for us."
By contributing their personal truths to one book, these women open wide the sacred circle of female bonding and include us all in the reassuring rhythms of female talk. Many of the anthology's contributors were firsts or among the firsts in their departments or even among the entire college faculty. Isolation, marginalization and the struggle to secure full-time tenure-track work without the benefit of mentors within the university system compelled the contributors to come together at Wintergreen and be reaffirmed.
But for the contributors to this collection, their journeys to a professional life of engagement with words, ideas and their own work as writers began much sooner than their first trips to Wintergreen. These narratives document pivotal moments in their own lives that led them to the writer's life. For some, those moments were violent, such as the time in 1950 that Gabbin "could not have seen the metal pipe that [a white boy] took from behind his back and crashed into my head" or when, in 1954, an adult raged at a young Janus Adams for integrating the local school: "She spat at me and tore my dress." Some of those moments are also beautiful, as when Nikky Finney's Grandmother Beulah gave her"the hands and heart to be a poet" or Paule Marshall's mother's friends would gather at the kitchen table and talk as "a kind of magic rite, a form of juju ..." And sometimes, those pivotal moments are as banal as Kendra Hamilton's "six week writing assignment, the kind tenth-grade teachers hand out every day" or the Friday evening in 1995 that Marilyn Sanders Mobley"decided to clean my closet."
Together, the 25 contributors, including Toi Derricotte, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans and Opal Moore, have generated a line of narratives that forms a circle, what Karla FC Holloway calls in her essay "a sanctuary of my own making. Words like a womb." Indeed, there is an impulse in the work collected in Shaping Memories that insists on rebirth.
-------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34
Through their work, literary, ambitious Black women writers remember and tell. They bear witness to their lives and the lives of other African Americans. Whether they are crafting fiction or nonfiction, these women tell truths - not one truth, but the many truths that together form the diverse experiences of Black American womanhood. Two books, one a memoir and the other a collection of short essays by Black women writers, work in this tradition. Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers, edited by Joanne Veal Gabbin, is an anthology of first-person essays crafted by academicians.
According to these sisters, the Ivory Tower has historically been hostile to the presence of Black women educators. In response to consistent subjugation and" othering" by the dominant gaze of their less-than-collegial university colleagues, these women come together to gaze lovingly upon each other at a regular retreat established by Gabbin called the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective.
In the first essay of the collection, "A Distant Star Called Possibility," Nikki Giovanni says this about Wintergreen:
"We played cards, swam,
walked in the woods (dodging the bears),
read poetry to the group,
cooked and ate,
and it was great.
It was supposed to be a onetime thing,
but we all said: Let's do it again.
And we have been doing it for the last twenty years ...
It is a safe place.
To relax.
To be surrounded by love.
To be.
A haven.
Where we cheer each other on...
riding the night winds,
our hearts skip across the clouds,
coming to rest on a distant star called possibility;
we arrive at Wintergreen.
Good for us."
By contributing their personal truths to one book, these women open wide the sacred circle of female bonding and include us all in the reassuring rhythms of female talk. Many of the anthology's contributors were firsts or among the firsts in their departments or even among the entire college faculty. Isolation, marginalization and the struggle to secure full-time tenure-track work without the benefit of mentors within the university system compelled the contributors to come together at Wintergreen and be reaffirmed.
But for the contributors to this collection, their journeys to a professional life of engagement with words, ideas and their own work as writers began much sooner than their first trips to Wintergreen. These narratives document pivotal moments in their own lives that led them to the writer's life. For some, those moments were violent, such as the time in 1950 that Gabbin "could not have seen the metal pipe that [a white boy] took from behind his back and crashed into my head" or when, in 1954, an adult raged at a young Janus Adams for integrating the local school: "She spat at me and tore my dress." Some of those moments are also beautiful, as when Nikky Finney's Grandmother Beulah gave her"the hands and heart to be a poet" or Paule Marshall's mother's friends would gather at the kitchen table and talk as "a kind of magic rite, a form of juju ..." And sometimes, those pivotal moments are as banal as Kendra Hamilton's "six week writing assignment, the kind tenth-grade teachers hand out every day" or the Friday evening in 1995 that Marilyn Sanders Mobley"decided to clean my closet."
Together, the 25 contributors, including Toi Derricotte, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans and Opal Moore, have generated a line of narratives that forms a circle, what Karla FC Holloway calls in her essay "a sanctuary of my own making. Words like a womb." Indeed, there is an impulse in the work collected in Shaping Memories that insists on rebirth.
-------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
From Rebirth To The Age of Social Responsibility
review by Darryl Wellington
If the generation of Black scribes who toiled and published – and struggled with the predetermined expectations of race-conscious audiences and editors, and still published-between 1934 and 1960 was "the indignant generation," what was the generation that preceded them? The sweeter generation? The art-for-arts-sake generation? Were they largely an unindignant generation? Of course not. The generation of Black writers and artists of the 1920s have a distinctive group name. They were not unaggrieved. Their period of flourishing artistic creativity became familiarly known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The primary engine behind the Harlem Renaissance was a savvy White patron, publicist and impresario, Carl Van Vechten. In the next decade, the major philanthropic power -"the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and ·1940s - was the Rosenwald Fund, based in Chicago, whose institutional largesse supplanted Van Vechten's patronage. The names changed, but nothing else? Lawrence P. Jackson's exhaustive The Indignant Generations is a record of how much changed. A subtle and essential cultural shift underscores The Indignant Generation's generational marker. It may have been as simple, yet as complex as distinctive differences in emphasis. The writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance tended to stress the elevation of Black identity, and the achievement of a sense of self-esteem equal to White America. The movement, which believed itself to be thoroughly modern, in vogue and progressive, was not untouched by the headiness and decadence that characterized the roaring '20s - hence it was not without its penchant to romanticize ecstatic jazz, exotic Africa, decorative art and sexual liberation. To be Black, yet full of self-confidence and in tune with the bohemian ideals of the roaring '20s was to be liberated, wasn't it?
Evidently not, said the next generation, for whom the romance soured, or rather, the faith that America's entrenched racism could be resolved by high art and bohemian swagger faded. The stock market crash rocked all America. The Great Depression legitimized class politics. The Black writers and artists of the '30s and early'40s regrouped after the socio-economic shocks (which hit hardest minority groups at the bottom of the barrel) and what little assistance they could find was provided by the Works Progress Administration writers and artists programs, the Rosenwald Fund, a few Black scholarly and political journals (such as The Crisis) and (in ways that should not be underestimated) the Communist Party USA. Sometimes domineering and manipulative, the Communist Party USA still championed causes such as the Scottsboro boys, and throughout the '40s - Lawrence P. Jackson frequently notes - "the typical young Black writer was still faced with only Communist front groups or racial uplift magazines to publish their work." The aesthetic ideal of the Communists of the day was social realism, and while Black writers frequently clashed with rigid CPUSA expectations, they were forged by them. The novels they wrote and plays they produced were also forged by offense that in the modern world – because they believed themselves to be as prescient and progressive in their thinking as had the members of the Harlem Renaissance - segregation was still the law of the land. To contemplate the situation was to know that indignation had reached an apocalyptic boiling point. Out of social irritants, and an intellectual impasse was born the late great protest novel.
The cultural and artistic watershed was Richard Wright's unrelentingly bleak and realistic Native Son, so challenging in its time that the entire indignant generation is sometimes characterized as "the Richard Wright school." "To name the period after its star is yet a misnomer," Jackson explains, both because of the diversity of perspectives within the period, and because the reaction against Wright was just as powerful as his initial influence. By the late fifties, thanks to critical responses championed by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, protest writing was out. A bouillabaisse of new criticism, idealistic social integrationism and complex ambiguity was in. Then another sea change hit, called Black power. The militant '60s Black aesthetic surpassed the indignant generation by foreswearing any identification with middle-class America at all.
The social realism of the'40s came and went. But who were the writers and books that defined old-school social realism, hammering at the walls of segregation? Try The Street by Ann Petry, Youngblood by John Oliver Killens, Stranger and Alone by J. Saunders Redding, Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith, to name a few. But good luck finding the books. The Indignant Generation is a study of a generation lost in history, whose accomplishments have often gone out of print. The sheer number of titles is astonishing; among them must be a few neglected masterpieces.
Lawrence P. Jackson – previously best known for his biography of Ralph Ellison - has done a masterful and comprehensive job of documenting and instigating a reconsideration of an angry generation who still believed that storytelling was a social responsibility. it's an idea that - reexamined in the era of Oliver Stone and Spike Lee- doesn't seem so old-fashioned at all. The works need to be reassessed in the light of day, not indignation.
- Darryl Loenzo Wellington lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has published his work in Dissent, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor.
This review appears in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p.33
If the generation of Black scribes who toiled and published – and struggled with the predetermined expectations of race-conscious audiences and editors, and still published-between 1934 and 1960 was "the indignant generation," what was the generation that preceded them? The sweeter generation? The art-for-arts-sake generation? Were they largely an unindignant generation? Of course not. The generation of Black writers and artists of the 1920s have a distinctive group name. They were not unaggrieved. Their period of flourishing artistic creativity became familiarly known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The primary engine behind the Harlem Renaissance was a savvy White patron, publicist and impresario, Carl Van Vechten. In the next decade, the major philanthropic power -"the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and ·1940s - was the Rosenwald Fund, based in Chicago, whose institutional largesse supplanted Van Vechten's patronage. The names changed, but nothing else? Lawrence P. Jackson's exhaustive The Indignant Generations is a record of how much changed. A subtle and essential cultural shift underscores The Indignant Generation's generational marker. It may have been as simple, yet as complex as distinctive differences in emphasis. The writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance tended to stress the elevation of Black identity, and the achievement of a sense of self-esteem equal to White America. The movement, which believed itself to be thoroughly modern, in vogue and progressive, was not untouched by the headiness and decadence that characterized the roaring '20s - hence it was not without its penchant to romanticize ecstatic jazz, exotic Africa, decorative art and sexual liberation. To be Black, yet full of self-confidence and in tune with the bohemian ideals of the roaring '20s was to be liberated, wasn't it?
Evidently not, said the next generation, for whom the romance soured, or rather, the faith that America's entrenched racism could be resolved by high art and bohemian swagger faded. The stock market crash rocked all America. The Great Depression legitimized class politics. The Black writers and artists of the '30s and early'40s regrouped after the socio-economic shocks (which hit hardest minority groups at the bottom of the barrel) and what little assistance they could find was provided by the Works Progress Administration writers and artists programs, the Rosenwald Fund, a few Black scholarly and political journals (such as The Crisis) and (in ways that should not be underestimated) the Communist Party USA. Sometimes domineering and manipulative, the Communist Party USA still championed causes such as the Scottsboro boys, and throughout the '40s - Lawrence P. Jackson frequently notes - "the typical young Black writer was still faced with only Communist front groups or racial uplift magazines to publish their work." The aesthetic ideal of the Communists of the day was social realism, and while Black writers frequently clashed with rigid CPUSA expectations, they were forged by them. The novels they wrote and plays they produced were also forged by offense that in the modern world – because they believed themselves to be as prescient and progressive in their thinking as had the members of the Harlem Renaissance - segregation was still the law of the land. To contemplate the situation was to know that indignation had reached an apocalyptic boiling point. Out of social irritants, and an intellectual impasse was born the late great protest novel.
The cultural and artistic watershed was Richard Wright's unrelentingly bleak and realistic Native Son, so challenging in its time that the entire indignant generation is sometimes characterized as "the Richard Wright school." "To name the period after its star is yet a misnomer," Jackson explains, both because of the diversity of perspectives within the period, and because the reaction against Wright was just as powerful as his initial influence. By the late fifties, thanks to critical responses championed by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, protest writing was out. A bouillabaisse of new criticism, idealistic social integrationism and complex ambiguity was in. Then another sea change hit, called Black power. The militant '60s Black aesthetic surpassed the indignant generation by foreswearing any identification with middle-class America at all.
The social realism of the'40s came and went. But who were the writers and books that defined old-school social realism, hammering at the walls of segregation? Try The Street by Ann Petry, Youngblood by John Oliver Killens, Stranger and Alone by J. Saunders Redding, Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith, to name a few. But good luck finding the books. The Indignant Generation is a study of a generation lost in history, whose accomplishments have often gone out of print. The sheer number of titles is astonishing; among them must be a few neglected masterpieces.
Lawrence P. Jackson – previously best known for his biography of Ralph Ellison - has done a masterful and comprehensive job of documenting and instigating a reconsideration of an angry generation who still believed that storytelling was a social responsibility. it's an idea that - reexamined in the era of Oliver Stone and Spike Lee- doesn't seem so old-fashioned at all. The works need to be reassessed in the light of day, not indignation.
- Darryl Loenzo Wellington lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has published his work in Dissent, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor.
This review appears in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p.33
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