Saint Rosa (and a sinner)

If the Constitution is our sacred text, then Rosa Parks is being canonized.

But it takes nothing away from the achievement of the "mother of the civil rights movement," I trust, to remember that she wasn't the first woman in Montgomery to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat. That honor belongs to Claudette Colvin, who as a 15-year-old girl had a nightmarish experience on the same Montgomery bus system before being hauled off and arrested.

Like Parks, she, too, pleaded not guilty to breaking the law. And, like Parks, the local black establishment started to rally support for her cause. But, unlike Parks, Colvin never made it into the civil rights hall of fame. Just as her case was beginning to catch the nation's imagination, she became pregnant. To this exclusively male and predominantly middle-class, church-dominated, local black leadership in Montgomery, she was a fallen woman. She fell out of history altogether.

It wasn't just that she was pregnant. She happened to have very dark skin. She was decidedly working-class. After a long history of carefully chosen plaintiffs as well as issues--the NAACP's pre-Brown strategy comes to mind--activists in Montgomery were not inclined to take a chance on Colvin. Said one of them, "She lived in a little shack. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks."

Although the dominant line on Colvin (for she usually does get a footnote) is that she was foul-mouthed and immature, hardly one for political prime time, that wasn't exactly true. And besides, once the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to conduct the boycott and file a constitutional class action in federal court, they chose her as one of the named plaintiffs.

She credits the lawsuit for ensuring the success of the boycott. She herself wasn't active in the boycott or the marches, she recalled the other day while reflecting on Parks' death. She was a poor single mother. "I didn't have the support to continue. If I went to jail, who would support my family?"

Rosa Parks is an American icon, but with images of a ruined New Orleans fresh in our minds, we needn't feel too triumphalist about what was accomplished in her name.

Nyro and other heros

So as I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Man Without a Country and I come upon this passage,

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What had happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."

I start to think, you know, Vonnegut is Bill Moyers with a sense of humor.

Then I get to the end of the book, which is a "Requiem" that begins,

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

And that, in fact, is something Bill Moyers had already said:

I see the future looking back at me from these photographs [of his grandchildren] and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know now what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

Anyway the upshot is that Vonnegut/Moyers left me with a longing for Laura Nyro, who died too young and too soon. "Save the Country!" (If you're lucky or patient, you can hear a snippet of it here.) I'm not the only one to try to channel her lately.

Racial hatred hits Durham again

Less than six months after an episode of cross-burnings in Durham, more evidence that white supremacy is alive and well.

North Carolina news

Amid depressing stories of scandal and incompetence in high places, Todd Morman notes two items of local interest:

Did Martha Stewart's prison friendship with Meg Scott Phipps have anything to do with Stewart's decision to start her line of branded homes in Cary, NC? Rumor has it (well, I thought the source was reliable) that Stewart's next development will be in Burlington, on Phipps' family land. Let's see if my sources are any good, eh?

and

The official site of Loggerheads, a movie about adoption [just opened] that's based on a true North Carolina story. The birth mother is actually living in Chapel Hill right now. Watch the trailer here [.mov]

The spelling Jones

In an unusually Safire mood, Paul has decided to work it out over "alright" v. "all right." Which is right already? He's right to suggest I am showing my age by sticking with the fussy "all right." "Alright" is an illiterate corruption. I hold to the 1975 American Heritage Dictionary and the 2nd edition Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), which tell us, as Paul noted, that "alright" is either a misspelling or it's vulgar.

Fowler's 3d ed. came out in 1996--a much revised version, Fowler being long gone. (He was gone for the 2nd ed. too, but the editing was lighter.) I remember John Updike's review in the New Yorker as being not generally positive. I'm wondering what that edition does with "all right" and if Updike had anything to say about it. But I need the complete New Yorker CD-ROM to find out.

Sure "the kids are alright." Kids are kids and need instruction, and so do their teen idols. Bob Dylan (writing during earlier days of this transitional time) seems to have been conflicted, but I find more uses of "all right" than "alright." Don't think twice: it's all right.

Miers: the other shoe falls.

Harriet Miers says it's all about executive privilege?

This story, for one, suggests otherwise.

I guess Slate will update its Miers-o-Meter soon (confirmation chances at 60 percent as of Wed.).

"Lone Star Statements"

I thought this item was going to be about Texas, but really it's much more amusing.

History turns a corner

Constance Baker Motley, Vivian Malone Jones, and Rosa Parks have passed from the scene within the space of a month.

"As people get older and people pass, it becomes more and more difficult to have that sort of firsthand knowledge" of the fight for integration, said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who met Parks as a 17-year-old student and activist. "It becomes a little more difficult to pass it on."

In my seminar, as we studied the Montgomery bus boycott and Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that resulted, we came up against a question: could the boycott have succeeded in changing the law without the court's involvement? Or flip it around: would a lawsuit without the public pressure, in the deeply resistant South just shortly after Brown, have achieved any lasting practical result?

In an important new book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael Klarman argues that Browder v. Gayle was virtually irrelevant:

[T]o focus on Gayle's contribution to desegregating Montgomery buses is to risk fundamentally misunderstanding the significance of the boycott to the modern civil rights movement. The boycott revealed the power of nonviolent protest, deprived southern whites of their illusions that blacks were satisfied with the racial status quo, challenged other southern blacks to match the efforts of those in Montgomery, and enlightened millions of whites around the nation and the world about Jim Crow. A less satisfactory outcome would have been disappointing to Montgomery blacks, but it hardly would have negated, or even greatly tarnished, the momentous accomplishments of the movement.

Jack Bass--biographer of Judge Frank Johnson, who along with Judge Richard Rives voted in favor of the the plaintiffs on a three-judge federal panel--sees it differently: "Only the federal courts and a deeply ingrained and abiding, if sometimes grudging, respect for the law achieved [the result of desegregating the buses]. These forces also provided a channel through which an essentially nonviolent revolution could flow."

Just possibly, both claims have some truth to them.

Chapel Hill to Bush: End war now.

Tonight the Town Council enthusiastically and unanimously passed a resolution brought to us by Dan Coleman, Jim Protzman, and Mark Marcopolis: "A Resolution Calling for New Federal Priorities." Listing a long train of abuses and omissions in public policy priorities, all of which have direct and sustained impact on local government, the resolution concludes,

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Mayor and Town Council that the Council hereby petitions the Bush Administration and Congress to immediately end the war in Iraq, re-establish a progressive tax code, curtail end favoritism toward corporate interests, develop responsible policies focused on renewable energy, and commit to priorities that reflect the common good.

(The editorial changes were suggested by Mayor Foy.)

Is this an exercise in frustration? I don't think so. Local government is the front lines. If we can't register the complaints of the people to the powerful in Washington, who can?

Shortly later into the meeting we received another similar petition on ending the war, signed by many citizens. We endorsed it unanimously too.

UPDATE: Somebody at Kos stole my tagline! (Just kidding. It was pretty obvious. Glad for the attention.)

Quilting in code? unraveling a myth

In South Carolina an African American woman, Ozella Williams, made quilts in patterns that, so her mother said, formed a code for navigating out of slavery on the Underground Railroad. The theory of the threaded language got a boost with the 1998 book Hidden in Plain Sight: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. The trouble is that respectable historians of slavery, including David Blight and Paul Finkelman, can find no evidence for it.

Says Blight, who has edited an essay collection in honor of the opening of the National Underground Railroad Center in Cincinnati, "This is 'myth' of the softest kind that serves the needs of the present for people who prefer their history as lore and little else."

Finkelman says that in his extensive research of antebellum court papers and other documents, he has never come across the slightest reference to a code in quilts. To his mind the interesting question is "why people are so desperate to create" this myth.

UPDATE: Another scholar on the H-Slavery list says, if you believe the quilt story he has a lawn jockey to sell you.

Friedman on Miers

Our friend Myles Friedman explains "Why Miers worries me so much" in today's N&O. He didn't even mention her inexplicable failure to pay her bar dues.

In other Friedman news, Kinky is still trying like crazy to get on the ballot in Texas. Wish him luck.

Seasonal tutorial

Check it out, pumpkin.

Downtown Chapel Hill redevelopment: one step closer

As reported today, on Monday the Chapel Hill Town Council will be voting on a memorandum of understanding with Ram Development for our downtown redevelopment project. For those of us on the negotiating team, it has been a fascinating and educating experience. We were capably assised in this complex negotiation by Charlotte real estate attorney Glen Hardymon.

The town web site has a nice set of documents (scroll down) that lay out the process and what the parties asked for and what we agreed on. The most significant thing that the town got was a fixed price for our own investment. It's going to be quite an interesting process to get from here through the final design stages to the point of seeing it rise up out of the ground.

Strunk & White, illustrated

Why didn't anybody do it before? is what Maria Kalman wanted to know. And if an illustrated Elements of Style is not enough, it's been set to music: opening tonight at the New York Public Library.

I hope they touch upon the "however" rule (one of my favorites).

UPDATE: How bloggy! Reader Terri-Lynn Sykes saw this info and urged a friend in NYC to go see the performance. That person did go and blogged a beautiful report, calling it "one of the most magical, hysterical, sincere, ironic, silly, glorious, hip, nerdy and just plain cool concerts ever performed."

West House: new lease on life

West House will not be demolished in Fall 2006 after all. The planned parking deck that it was standing in the way of has been taken off the drawing board. Surely the West House Coalition, headed by the indefatigable Jeffrey Beam with strategic assists from Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, deserves some of the credit.

University officials caution that it would be "premature" to assume West House will never fall to new development. But this news is certainly good news. At the least, it buys time for some creative thinking about alternatives (including relocation to another campus site).

Please consider adding your name to the Coalition's petition in support of West House's continued existence as part of UNC's future Arts Common.

One man's trash . . .

In a straightforward opinion rehearsing the law of search and seizure and that of abandonment, the Montana Supreme Court decides that a man who had thrown out evidence of the manufacture of methamphetamines had no reasonable expectation of privacy when the police came along and did a "trash dive."

Concurring justice James C. Nelson agrees that the law is in the state's favor. But he doesn't like it one little bit:

I don't like living in Orwell's 1984; but I do. And, absent the next extinction event or civil libertarians taking charge of the government (the former being more likely than the latter), the best we can do is try to keep [Uncle] Sam and the sub-Sams on a short leash.

And he holds open the possibility of reconsidering next time, "even if I have to think outside the garbage can to get there."

Speaker ban film wins award

Gorham "Hap" Kindem, professor in the communication studies department at UNC, will receive an award at a Berkeley film festival for his film on the UNC speaker ban. The late and beloved Joe Straley is interviewed for his part in it. Amazingly, Kindem found footage of the offending speeches in a London TV archive.

I do hope it'll come to Chapel Hill audiences soon.

Harper's Ferry, 1859

On October 16, 1959, John Brown launched a rebellion to free the slaves in Harper's Ferry. It didn't succeed. But neither did he die in the effort. Rather, he lived to be tried and sentenced to death, all the while writing himself into American history as a romantic martyr to the abolitionist cause.

In Robert Ferguson's analysis, John Brown

roused visions in the American psyche of both cultural fulfillment and purification. These visions in turn competed with nightmares of armed invasion and racial warfare in simultaneous and compelled narratives that made Brown both hero and villain. None of these narratives had much to do with the facts of Harper's Ferry. The narratives conflated political, religious, legal, and racial perceptions in formulaic patterns that, in turn, exaggerated every possibility--and especially exaggerated the character of Brown. This strategy of exaggeration transfigured Brown from lifelong bungler, bankrupt, narrow extremist, murderer, and border fugitive into a cultural icon.

Marines storming the engine-house. (Historic photo collection, Harper's Ferry NHP.)

Such was the staying power of the romantic narrative of John Brown's life that the true origin of the famous song about him has been lost. It was actually written as a joke on a Union soldier who happened to share Brown's name.

"Lost entirely is the low humor and comic incongruity, hero against anti-hero, that gave birth to the jingle," writes Ferguson. "[This John Brown] would, in fact, die pathetically rather than in pathos, drowning by accident while crossing the Rappahannock River with his regiment on June 6, 1862."

Meanwhile in December 1861, Julia Ward Howe took history by the hands: she grabbed hold of this undignified ditty and turned it into "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Brought to you by the letter l.

A blog obsessed with a typographical topic that had, frankly, escaped me.

In a different voice

I'm blogging live from rehearsal of the North Carolina Boys Choir. The sopranos are lovely, but something is missing: my son's voice. Over the summer, Tucker shifted to a lower register. It was bound to happen, but it's a strange and unexpected thing to mourn.