Skip to main content

Birth of a Dream



I still think this is one of the best books written about King and the origins of the Civil Rights Movement.  My big moment came in documenting the Sixteenth St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for the Historical American Buildings Survey.  It gave a much deeper sense of the events that shaped the movement.  It was also the summer I read the book.

Comments

  1. This is the only post that I can respond to on the blog. I have been having this problem for three days. When I click on the comments section for the other posts, the blog stalls.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Had the same problem as well, Rick. Switched to Google Chrome as my browser and the problem went away.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Always associate Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" with the death of MLK, but it was about conditions in general at the times. Great concert footage of Marvin singing this wonderful song,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s

    ReplyDelete
  4. Interesting to read Rick Santorum voicing so much concern for disenfranchised black voters,

    When given the first opportunity, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum jumped into the Romney pile-on by calling out a pro-Romney super PAC for releasing an ad that criticized Santorum for supporting a bill that let convicted felons vote once they had served their time. Santorum hit back by saying he felt that people who served their time should be free to vote and pressed Romney on his own position.

    "This is Martin Luther King Day," Santorum said, interrupting Romney when he tried to defend himself. "This is a huge deal in the African American community, because we have very high rates of incarceration--disproportionally high rates particularly with drug crimes within the African American community."

    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/candidates-pile-romney-south-carolina-debate-040231969.html

    But, as one might suspect it was just a trap to catch Romney, who had supported even more "radical" legislation in Massachusetts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005