When I was a young teenager, the local Catholic parish, The Church of the Holy Trinity, would sponsor what they called a Friday Night Social. This was held at the Norwegian Hall, right across from the Los Angeles Hotel in the Berea neighborhood of Durban, South Africa. A few years later, I became a denizen […]
CoreCivic Responds to Hard Crackers
Well, well, well, imagine our surprise when we received an email message from Ryan Gustin, the Public Affairs Manager of CoreCivic, the outfit that operates the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee, in response to an interview about the prison that Hard Crackers published on June 4th. Our interview was with the wife of a […]
Dead Teachers Can’t Teach
Today, August 3rd teachers in Knoxville, Tennessee report to work. Despite climbing COVID rates and fears and anxieties of teachers, parents and students, the superintendent of Knox County schools has not backtracked from his plan to reopen schools. Knoxville, a liberal bastion in a red state, has not broken rank from the likes of Governor […]
Killing Time
You can hear a sulking refrain from some corners of the internet lately, usually from armchair revolutionaries, celebrity leftists, or just the “extremely online”: the militant phase of the 2020 uprising against police terror is over—liberal reformers have successfully coopted it. The refrain comes tinged with defeat and a sense that things are already done. […]
Evictions = Death
Yesterday morning, two masked protestors dropped a banner from the roof of the New Orleans First City Court. It read: “Evictions = Death” Locking arms and banging on pots and pans, protestors blocked people, some of them landlords, from entering City Hall which also houses the 1st City and Orleans Parish Civil District courts. Since […]
“Phillip My Dear”: The Mighty Sparrow Turns 85
In the early 1980s when I was cabbing for a living, there was a NYC radio station that devoted all of its Sunday programming to reggae and calypso music. The deejays knew their stuff, and they covered a lot of ground, from the famous artists like the Wailers to the more select acts, such as […]