"Everyone in Oxford is very upset about the three missing workers from the Philadelphia area." 

Thanks to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, we have a brief glimpse of daily life for the Freedom Summer volunteers still in training in Oxford, Ohio, after the disappearance of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner on June 21, 1964.  

The memo, dated June 24, 1964, was written by Agent X, a black man from Mississippi who had joined the movement to spy for the Sovereignty Commission and traveled to Oxford.

The ostensible purpose of the document is to report on the comments by movement leader James Lawson that morning regarding a recent conversation with Martin Luther King, and King's plans "to clean things up" in Jackson -- just the kind of fear fantasy the Sovereignty Commission loved to traffic in. 

More pertinent today are Lawson's comments on the importance that the students remain non-violent once in Mississippi.     

"He told [the students] that they were not going to Mississippi to make war, although it would be worse than a war, as they would be beaten by the police and local people." And worse. 

And more poignant is the students' resolve in spite of the clear and present danger they faced in Mississippi.   

"They are very hurt [by the news about the three who disappeared] but say they will not stop their plans," Agent X reports.

"Floods of telegrams and telephone calls came into Oxford from the parents of their students and the students would not answer them until urged to do so by the officials." 

Nathan Bedford Forrest has lost another one. The decision to change the name of the Jacksonville, Florida, high school that has born his name since 1959 was made late last year. Now that the school year is over, his name is coming down and signs for the new name, Westside High, are going up. http://hrld.us/1iGia0Y

Luckily for the children of Jacksonville, a complete Confederate education is still available, first grade through senior year. Deo Vindice.    

A memorial service for Medgar Evers was held at the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery on June 5, 2013, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his assassination. 

Phil Bryant, governor of Mississippi, was a speaker.

Former President Bill Clinton

Myrlie Evers-Williams

Reenactors marked the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Olustee in northern Florida this past weekend (Feb. 15 & 16).   

No VSCO

M5

G3

B1

This a straight-up Google translation of Antjie Krog's poem about Mandela, written in Afrikans. The original is here. 

Krog is a South African poet who, among other things, covered the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, her account of that grueling, frustrating, incomplete but transformative process, is a small masterpiece, and should be required reading for everyone who today is so easily, if rightfully, praising Mandela for his commitment to reconciliation.   

underground a ridge moved

Earth stumble

confused tottering sun

When his breath left him in the night

the stars geduisel

because everything is intertwined

throttling to death

His death and death alone

once everything is sad

as if we were in a big shadow standing

if we break through glass

if we splinter into stone

as if our minds in whispering groups around desperate flight

like spears into the ground stuck

vibratory

at Qunu refused this morning to the herds of the family to go

Lusikisiki to lay the fish close to the surface

in Mvezo bustards make no sound

the thought of Mandela let's interiors break

(We wanted his dying body see)

we can not even open the mouth

(We wanted his dying body see)

to start talking about his death to discuss his works

(We wanted his dying body see)

his blood which dart like a leopard for justice

(We wanted his dying body see)

to tell of his works, his incredibly soft power

(We wanted his dying body see)

the lovely flowering seams of his skull forgiving

(We wanted his dying body see)

the battering ram of his tongue

that futures to an associated nuclear wring

we can not do justice to our great

(We wanted his dying body see)

we do not see

in the walkways on the sidewalks, in bushes along the roads

bundle together our silence, we gewones

We sprinkle our tears over him

We sprinkled the legacy

the Fearless Warrior we once ruled

We sprinkled the body that need to be washed

We sprinkled the blood of Mandela opened

gewones we were not with water but with songs

grudgingly we take his body

we had it, we bathe them

with hands that loved him, we get to his deeds

we give him, from hand to hand

high above our heads

the man we saved ourselves

o singing blood of the son of uNosekeni

o palms of Mvezo with stars and rain to the shores

o Qunu arms of a country's deepest wounds embrace

Great Aanmekaarbinder

nobody's larynx could Mandela's song End of singing

nobody ever deglaze our Great Saambinder for us

no one surpassed him in moral authority

no leader is ever so his people loved not

he is our best face wash

he that we ourselves gave it back

the embodiment of the world's desire

to someone who cares

whose acts unashamedly goodness would bring

beloved Mandela, bring blessing to us, your children

let your life his fingerprint on all of us

it will be long before we ever a man so noble

someone as stubborn and healing nicely

tough by nature so strict principle of including

so elegant and astoundingly heart of our mortal arms can hold

- Antjie Krog

(Based on the lament written for Moshoeshoe 1, "LITHOKHOKISO le tse tsa Moshoeshoe up" by David Cranmer Theko Bereng.)

The greatest live music I've ever heard was T-Model Ford at Red's in Clarksdale. Live, T-Model's North Mississippi Hill Blues was both raw and overcooked, and unspeakably loud. Above: Playing at Red's, February 13, 2010.  

The note Carolyn Goodman sent to SNCC giving her son Andrew permission to participate in Freedom Summer in Mississippi. He, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were murdered just outside of Philadelphia 49 years ago today.

The note is part of Andrew Goldman's Freedom Summer application (PDF), which is online at the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website. 

As my car had NY plates, they let me pass. 

For a few hours Friday, a Confederate battle flag flew over a Mississippi state building.

“Have we seceded already?” asked Joseph Parker, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Southern Mississippi. “The execution is faster than I thought.”

The Confederate battle flag was placed atop the state Supreme Court building about 2 p.m. Friday as a result of a mistake, explained Kym Wiggins, public information officer for the state Department of Finance and Administration.

She said the flag accidentally was put up to replace a Mississippi state flag that was tattered and torn.

 

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20130209/NEWS01/302090036/Confederate-fl...

"Where 50,000 Guns Recovered in Chicago Came From"

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/29/us/where-50000-guns-in-chicago-...

For his 1961 inauguration, JFK invited Robert Frost to recite his 1942 poem "The Gift Outright." Ahead of the ceremony Frost decided to compose 70-plus new lines to read as a preface to his 16-line "Gift."

Came the sunny cold day, however, and the 86-year-old Frost could not make out the new words of on the sheet of paper he held. After some fumbling as well ineffective assistance from LBJ, among others, Frost recovered and grandly recited the "Gift" from memory. 

William Pritchard later wrote: 

Putting behind him the stumbling uncertainties of voice and tone which characterized his attempt to deliver the new poem, he fell back on an old one he knew perfectly, and in the most splendidly commanding of voices read "The Gift Outright" impeccably: "The land was ours before we were the land's."

His performance thus attained a dramatic, even a heroic quality, which it would otherwise have lacked if things had gone off perfectly. The imperfect version had more of "life" in it: in the midst of flattery and display, the sound of sense suddenly and movingly made itself felt.

Derek Wolcott had a more caustic response:

The choice of poem was not visionary so much as defensive. A Navajo hymn might have been more appropriate: the the "ours" and the "we" of Frost were not as ample and multihued as Whitman's tapestry, but something as tight and regional as a Grandma Moses painting, a Currier and Ives print, strictly New England in black and white.

By then as much an emblem of the republic as any rubicund senator with his flying white hair, an endangered species like a rare owl, there was the old poet who, between managing the fluttering white hair and the fluttering white paper, had to recite what sounded more like an elegy than a benediction. "The land was ours before we were the land's" could have had no other name, not only because he was then in his old age, but because all his spirit and career, like Thomas Hardy's, lurched toward a wintry wisdom. 

The Pritchard and Wolcott excerpts come from a collection of responses to Frost's poem and performance: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gift.htm 

The full texts of the two poems: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/inauguration/frost_poem.html

Read more about Frost's invitation to participate and events involving him on inaurguation day: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20540   

http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/apartheid

1 Police Plaza, 10/12/12

High ceilings, great light

Killer views

Room to have friends over

Custom toile on the walls

All the right books, I 

A strong belief in print

Shades of Walter White in his meth lab: 

[Jefferson] launched the nailery in 1794 and supervised it personally for three years. "I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself." He said he spent half the day counting and measuring nails. In the morning he weighed and distributed nail rod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted.

Henry Wiencek details Thomas Jefferson's nail-making operation at Monticello in the latest issue of Smithsonian. The article is an excerpt from Wiencek's new book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. In part, Wiencek writes, the nailery appealed to Jefferson as a way determine the aptitudes and skills of his young male slaves.  

The nailery "particularly suited me," he wrote, "because it would employ a parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle." Equally important, it served as a training and testing ground. All the nail boys got extra food; those who did well received a new suit of clothes, and they could also expect to graduate, as it were, to training as artisans rather than going "in the ground" as common field slaves.

Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters or coopers. Wormley Hughes, a slave who became head gardener, started in the nailery, as did Burwell Colbert, who rose to become the mansion's butler and Jefferson's personal attendant. Isaac Granger, the son of an enslaved Monticello foreman, Great George Granger, was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging 80 cents a day over the first six months of 1796, when he was 20; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. Confined for long hours in the hot, smoky workshop, the boys hammered out 5,000 to 10,000 nails a day, producing a gross income of $2,000 in 1796. Jefferson's competition for the nailery was the state penitentiary.

Stop and read that last sentence again. It contains the entire history of the South, or maybe the country.  

Jefferson was also juiced by his new-found cash flow:   

Just months after the factory began operation, [Jefferson] wrote that "a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family." Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire annual grocery bill for the white family. He wrote to a Richmond merchant, "My groceries come to between 4. and 500. Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough every fortnight [emphasis added] to pay a quarter's bill."

There's a lot more, just in the excerpt. None of it gets any better. All men are created equal. But Jefferson, like Walter White, was in the empire business.