Leon Bass’ Upcoming Book

Leon Bass has written a memoir that will be published in January.

UPDATE:

Yet another thoughtful and heartfelt post from Jack Crane:

I did not know Leon Bass’ story – thanks for the introduction Jeff. I have been privileged to experience some of his generation’s heroes on the South Side, courageous souls who have overcome all the odds with dogged hard work, intelligence and supreme dignity. Last Friday evening I heard truly world class opera singers from the South Shore Opera Company at the South Shore Cultural Center. Most of the singers were born and raised in Chicago, and educated around the world. They sung to a packed audience of young and old fans of opera. Of course, I had a bit of a chuckle at the irony of a mostly Black audience and performers celebrating Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess” opera at a venue that banned Blacks and Jews from membership a generation ago.

I must admit too, that I clung hard to the rich and beautiful culture and spirit permeating the South Side that evening, as far, far too much of what I experience on the South Side is the near complete collapse of viable neighborhoods, and the wholesale abandonment of thousands of Black children. Which brings me to the madness of Father Mike Pfleger. I am glad Bob McClory has committed himself to a deeper look into Mike’s work than youtube sound bites. When the likes of Mike Pfleger are no longer welcome in the Catholic Church, you can put a permanent lock on its door. Furthermore, I am afraid the seeds have been sown for many years, whereby thousands of Black kids who have little capacity for work generating a living wage, will be very susceptible to turning towards far crazier and violent charismatic leaders, waiting for their prey.

Nevertheless, my head will hit the pillow tonight recalling magical soprano notes, sung in a former racist venue, and that is plenty of hope to help me haul up the morning.

jack

ORIGINAL POST:

This month has had a veritable treasure trove of memorable experiences.

From braving cold, wind, sand and a driving rain while biking 100 kilometers to celebrating the completion of a book with Agnes Consadori to interviewing Robert Coles to celebrating 45 years of life, October 2010 has been an extraordinarily rich month.  The sweetness I’ve felt has been made even more so because the first eight months of the year had more than their share of hardship.

One of my absolute favorite of these experiences came on Tuesday, when Dunreith and I flew to Cleveland for the Facing History and Ourselves fundraising dinner.

Dear friend and personal hero Leon Bass was the keynote speaker.  Calvin Morris, our executive director at Community Renewal Society and one of Dr. Bass’ fifth grade students in 1951, introduced him by singing an Oscar Brown song, “Brother, where are you?”

Bob McClory on Father Pfleger

Friend and neighbor Bob McClory will read from his biography of Father Pfleger tomorrow night.

Friend, neighbor and former priest Bob McClory will be reading from his latest book, Radical Disciple, a biography of controversial priest Michael Pfleger, tomorrow night at the Borders in downtown Evanston.

I’ve not yet seen the book, but look forward to purchasing and reading it.  In Pfleger, McClory has a fascinating protagonist, and I’m confident he’s more than up to the task of taking the measure of the Southwest Side native who was galvanized by seeing Dr. King attacked while marching in Marquette Park in 1966.

I’ve written before about McClory’s first book, a biography of Renault Robinson, and have also read his work about the fight led by lay people in the 1960s to change Catholic doctrine about birth control.

One of the major opponents: a young, ambitious German cardinal named Ratzinger, who is now better known as Pope Benedict.

McClory most recent book before this one was a plea to the Catholic Church to stay viable by returning to its spiritual roots.

Now in his late 70s, McClory does not walk as fast as he used to, but he gives me strength and inspiration by continuing to research, read and write.  I eagerly anticipate learning from him as I  hear him read from his latest work about a driven, dynamic and flawed human being seeking to make change on the city’s South Side.

Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz is a haunting class memoir.

There are less than two weeks to go until I meet the other members of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma in Orvieto, Italy, and I can feel our excitement pulsing through introductory emails, chats and questions about logistics.

As part of our preparations, we have assigned readings.   There is a list of close to 30 scholarly articles of which eight are strongly suggested and a number of books.

Today I finished Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, his classic memoir and the second of the four books on the list.

Earl Shorris seeks to make trouble.

An older picture of the humanities advocate.

“I want to ask all of you to join me in making trouble,” declared National Humanities medal winner Earl Shorris during a lunchtime session at the University of Chicago’s School of Service Administration last Thursday.”The mission here is to make the poor dangerous.”

The balding, bespectacled would-be troublemaker’s weapon to fight poverty: the humanities.

Having taken his method of combating what he called the “surround of force”-by that he means the range of elements in poor communities that have the effect of dulling residents’ humanity-around the globe, Shorris said he wants for the first time to place his curriculum in a high school.

A South Side Chicago high school, to be precise.

Shorris said he’s worked with 12,000 students in five continents, adding that his curriculum enables them to “exercise their own innate humanity at the highest level.”  Studying the humanities helps people expand their horizons and be more reflective, he said.

Shorris talked about a four-year curriculum and a collaboration between university professors and Chicago Teacher’s Union members.  First-year readings and artwork he mentioned included Plato’s Allegory of a Cave, The Apology by Crito and artwork from Benin.

Shorris combined avuncular charm-he repeatedly asked people who made statements he found appealing, “Will you work with me?”-with a native New Yorker’s feistiness.  At moments he seemed dogmatic and to be implying that no one in Chicago to date has ever taught the humanities.  On the one hand, he said that the professors would be paid because they were not performing acts of charity, while on the other hand he boasted about how inexpensive his courses would be.

On a more philosophical level, while Shorris’ point that it’s cheaper to educate people than to fix the conditions that create the ‘surround of force’ may be true, that fact  should not signal the end of that goal

Still, to me there was something appealing about a firm insistence on the humanities’ importance and liberating potential.  I didn’t leave the lecture convinced that Shorris’ vision was the right way to go, but I did want to take another look at the Allegory of the Cave and to follow his progress.

Joao Silva Latest Casualty of the Bang Bang Club

 

Joao Silva was the latest casualty of The Bang Bang Club.

Beloved and respected war photographer Joao Silva lost both legs below the knee yesterday after stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan.

 

I first heard the news from my brother Jon, whose dear friend David Guttenfelder is another acclaimed war photographer who knows Silva well and prays for his safe recovery.

Known for his bravery and caution, Silva is the latest member of The Bang Bang Club to be injured.  The club was the name given to four photographers-Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and Silva-who worked in the townships of South Africa from the period after Nelson Mandela was released in February 1990 to the first free and democratic elections that were held in April 1994.

I have not yet read Marinovich and Silva’s book or seen the film by the same name, but Jon has told me that it is an engaging read.  Beyond the four in the group, legendary photographer James Nachtwey also is a character in the work.

Should Juan Williams have been fired?

 

Should Juan Williams have been fired by NPR?

Longtime NPR commentator Juan Williams was fired today for comments he made on the O’Reilly Factor about being made nervous by Muslims on airplanes.

 

During an appearance on the conservative Fox network, Williams said the following:

“I think, look, political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality,” Williams said to Bill O’Reilly during the Monday appearance.

Williams continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Williams has written a number of books, including a couple I’ve read.  His  companion to Eyes on the Prize, the  landmark documentary series produced by the late Henry Hampton, is both accessible and helpful.  He’s also written a useful biography of legendary civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Apology for Clarence Thomas, Toni Morrison’s presentation.

Virginia Thomas has sought an apology from Anita Hill to her husband Clarence.

In an unusual development,  Clarence Thomas’ wife recently called Brandeis University law professor Anita Hill and asked her to apologize to her husband.

Hill does not seem likely to comply with Mrs. Thomas’ request, saying that she does not plan to say she is sorry for things Thomas said and did.

For those who somehow do not remember, Hill’s 1991 testimony contained lurid details of sexual harassment that sparked national conversation about the topic.

Thomas’ nomination was narrowly approved after he endured what he called a “high-tech” lynching.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison edited a collection of essays about the hearings called Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power that is worth reading.

As I mentioned yesterday, Dunreith, Ava and I heard her speak about, and read from,  A Mercy, her most recent book, and one that was selected for the Chicago Public Library’s One Book, One Chicago program.

The three of us enjoyed her remarks before the reading more than the reading itself.  During those comments she spoke about how she has been thinking and writing about the lethal consequences of racism for the past 40 years.

She also talked about a childhood friend who was the unwitting inspiration for The Bluest Eye, her first novel.  The friend and Morrison were about 9 or 10 years old and were walking together when the friend shared that she had been  praying for 2 years to have blue eyes.

Morrison said she looked at the friend, and, for the first time in her life, saw someone beautiful.  Had the wish come true, she said, the friend would have looked grotesque.

She also talked about the late 1600s, when the novel takes place, and the collection of landed gentry, indentured servants, American Indians and slaves who made up the crew involved in Bacon’s Rebellion.

When the governor returned, the rebellion was put down and member of its members killed.  This murderous form of discipline anticipated the real, not high-tech, lynchings that were part of life for black people in many different parts of the country in history.

Friend and former colleague Veronica Anderson Thigpen wrote last night that she could have listened to Morrison for another hour or two.

Her brilliance was in stark contrast to Thomas’ behavior and his wife’s (to me) bizarre request.  I recommend her book about the incident between Hill and Thomas, and any other of her works, for that matter.

Hearing Toni Morrison Tonight

 

Toni Morrison will be speaking tonight, and I can't wait to hear her.

In what promises to be  a real treat, Dunreith, Ava and I are going to hear Toni Morrison speak tonight.

 

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full 20 years since Jon, Mom, and I went to Harvard to listen to the not-yet-named Nobel Prize winner deliver two of the three lectures that became the basis for Playing in the Dark.  In the book, Morrison argued persuasively that there has been what she called “an Africanist presence” in American literature.  This presence, she said, has been central, not peripheral to white American authors.

In the talks she discussed writers like Willa Cather, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway.

One of my favorite moments came during the question and answer session.  If I remember correctly, the questioned asserted that black people had contributed little of literary merit.

“I disagree,” Morrison said, simply.  The auditorium erupted in applause.

In addition Playing in the Dark, I’ve read Sula, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, with the first and last books being particularly appealing to me.

Attending any event with Dunreith and Ava is guaranteed to be stimulating in its own right; being with them to hear Toni Morrison should make the evening even better.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

Salem witch trials, Boyer and Nissenbaum’s book.

I’m back in my home town of Brookline for the weekend, checking in on Mom and Dad and luxuriating in the cool crisp New England weather just before the foliage season hits its full glory.

A bit north of here is Salem, home of the infamous witch trials from the late 17th century.  As a Boston Globe editorial noted today, October is a particularly significant month for Salem locals, as it was during this month that the trials actually occurred.

During the summer of 1986 I took an American History class from Alan Galley, who since has gone on to become a Bancroft Award-winning history.  Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed was one of the texts we read for the course, along with Peter Wood’s Black Majority.

In Salem Possessed, the authors looked at the town’s social composition, arguing that the hysteria over witchcraft was partially explained by those aspects of its configuration.  It also talked about how Salem had changed in the two generations since its founding, losing its connection to its original Puritan charter.

Race, the foreclosure crisis and American apartheid.

The foreclosure crisis has been gripping the country for  several yars now, with President Obama catching heat recently over his failure to sign legislation that some say would help lessen the crisis.

That Americans of all background have been hit by the forcelousre is well-documented. However, a recent study by Princetion scholar Douglas Massey shows a racial dimension to the crisis’ origins and impact.

Massey and co-author Jacob Rugh analyzed data from the top 100 residential areas, finding that residential segregation created a niche for real estat agents to exploit.

They did so with vigor.

Massey wrote previously about residential segregation in a sobering and somewhat bleak look at Chicago that he co-authored with Nancy Denton called American Apartheid.  As the name suggests, the work found convincing evidence of separate and unequal treatment in housing and other arenas in America’s third-largest city.

His most recent work, 20 years later and with a national perspective, suggests that little has changed.  What is different about this work is its pointing out how “all of us” pay the price for the exploitation of some of us.