How We Got Here, In A Few Paragraphs. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” — Abraham Lincoln By the 1980’s America was filled with millions of average folks, mostly white…

The Wilted Rose. I’ll tell you what I know of time, Then said the Passerby, It little matters that you know, But Listen, and draw nigh: Time is a drink we swallow whole, when someone holds the cup, Time is a door we open up yet soon forget to close, …

A Brief Reminder When John Kennedy ran for President, conservative whites, especially in the South, claimed to fear that he would take orders from the Vatican. He famously went to Houston where with his brilliance and candor he explained his understanding of our American system of government — he outlined…

Fragment IV. The only Jazz is just an elegant ballroom dance somebody danced one night when they got overdressed. The only Jazz is a standard slow dance that stopped to fade from 45 to 33 to 16 revolutions a century to just a moment that a skipping needle stopped to lift you up off the ground, The only Jazz is for be-bop virtuosos who play riffs with streams like the waterfalls and then slip and fall and brush it off like it

Fragment I was once in Huck Finn’s hometown, exceptin’ for the fact that I ain’t sure Huck Finn really lived at all; except in the mind of a man named Sam Clemens who lived alongside a muddy river bank in a place called Hannibal, MO. I been there once, too…

Carl Sandburg I once made a visit to old Carl Sandburg’s home, A small little cottage there in an Illinois town, Not far from where Lincoln and Douglas speechified, Where Abe crawled atop of the world yet unknown, He joked that was all the college he’d been through, Once he…

The Auction (edit) Outside the ship the auction starts With smell of blood and rotted hearts: “Oh, you stand there gal, Don’t you make a twitch, Stand on that block, With your blackness out, And with your belly hanging down, Stand right up straight while the bidders shout.” “See, she…

April Sixty-five They took Bob Lee at the Courthouse steps on a day in April sixty-five, But they say Jeff Davis would never give a lick, Until Bob Lee sat on those Courthouse steps, That’s the final day when them Rebels’ give in, Ole Jeff he still thought he had…

Forever in the Path: Tuskegee And the Origins of the Movement for Civil Rights: Monroe Work’s Lifetime Crusade Against Racist Violence. As a young man, maybe even as a teenager, at least by the age that I was old enough to understand part of the psycho-sexual social phenomenon that white…