In the dusty book shelves of an unnamed Harlem resident’s basement we uncovered this letter written in 1912 from the man later known as Ho Chi Minh to his father back home. Dearest father, I wanted to write to you because I know you must be worried about my whereabouts. I am safely living in […]
Archives for 2018
Google User Reviews of US Jails and Prisons
People across the US are taking to Google user reviews with grievances about the jails and prisons where they and their loved ones are held.
“Stand Up and Be Counted”: Aretha, Sixties Soul, and Power
I was never a fan of Motown and sixties R&B; it came a decade before I came of age and I was never retroactively especially drawn to it. But that musical era still brings back memories as an early teenager growing up in a majority Black neighborhood in northwest Baltimore, of the one-room corner record […]
The future of labor unions
Heard on the radio this morning: Gus Atsas, newly-elected president of United Steelworkers Local 1014, which has about 2,020 members at U.S. Steel Gary Works (which once employed 27,000 people and where your correspondent had the honor to work from 1971 to 1975) announced that the members had voted to authorize a strike. (For those […]
Three barbers working furiously… and a fourth murdered
It has become a tradition in Chicago for black barbers to give free haircuts to neighborhood schoolboys during the last days before school commences. (Chicago Public Schools open Tuesday.) I walked by the neighborhood barber shop directly south at about 7 PM last night. The shop was absolutely packed with children. A mother was guiding […]
This Mongrel Nation
“American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestable mulatto . . .Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people in the United States resemble nobody […]