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 […]
The Ordinary/Extraordinary May Stevens
May Stevens was born in 1924 and, at the age of 94, lives in New Mexico. She has been, for most of her life, an artist. For the last seven decades, she’s been a political artist. I don’t know if she still creates art for public viewing. I hope so but that may be an […]
Remembering David McReynolds
A friend who spent many years in the Catholic Worker-inspired anti-war movement sent me an email about the death of David McReynolds and a link to a collection of photos taken by McReynolds throughout his adult life. One set of photos is from Ocean Park, California in 1947. The photos are accompanied by what I […]
Beyond A Boundary
On a job in an upscale Baltimore assisted-living facility that I worked at for far too long, going to work meant dealing with a running quasi-racial tension where lines were sharply drawn and people adhered to either one side or the other with little middle ground. Only lines weren’t drawn between Black and white, but […]