And the winner is …

David Russell tames more than animals. He won the Black History Month Quiz, too.

David Russell!!!!

David took first prize in the Black History Month Quiz.

For his victory, David will get one of the following:

a. A Kombucha drink of his choice.

b. A beer of his choice.

The prize is redeemable within a year at any location in which David and I are in the same place!

Congratulations, David!   And well done to Bob Yovovich, who earned honorable mention!

Here are the answers:

1. Who founded Black History Month? Carter G. Woodson.
2. Who was the first African American to receive a PhD. from Harvard University? W.E.B. DuBois
3. Name two major events in black history that occurred on August 28. 1963. March on Washington, Obama receives the Democratic nomination in 2008, and Emmett Till’s murder.
4. Who was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature? Toni Morrison.
5. Who was Chicago’s first black mayor?  Whom did he defeat in the general election?  What was the voter turnout percentage in the general election? Harold Washington, Bernard Epton, 79 percent.
6. Which recently deceased Chicago author was a member of the black and gay lesbian writer Halls of Fame? Studs Terkel
7. How many NBA championships have the Chicago Bulls won?  Name two black players who were on all of the championship teams. 6 championships. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
8. Which famous black abolitionist was born Isabella Baumfree? What is her most famous phrase? Sojourner Truth. “Ain’t I a woman?”
9. Who was born 200 years ago yesterday?  Why is his birthday significant in terms of black history?  Abraham Lincoln. He signed the 13th Amendment.
10. Name three black editors and publishers of The Chicago Reporter. Alden Loury, Laura Washington, Alysia Tate.
11. Who was the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice? What is his most famous case? How many times did he argue in front of the Supreme Court?  How many times did he win? Thurgood Marshall. Brown v. Board of Education. 32. 29.
12. Which Chicago female poet became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950?  Gwendolyn Brooks.
13. Name five African Americans who have won Academy Awards for either best actor or best actress. Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Hattie McDaniel, Lou Gossett, Jr., Sidney Poitier, Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson.
14. What is the one-drop rule and why is it significant for black people in American history? One drop of “black blood” meant that the person was considered black.  It was used as the basis for enforcing segregation’s laws.
15. True or false: The first black people to come to America were slaves. False. They were indentured servants.
16. Name two of the three places in the U.S. Constitution where slavery is included but not mentioned by name. Extra credit: Name all three places. 3/5ths clause. Non-importation of slaves after 1808. Fugitive Slave Clause.
17. Which three post-Civil War Amendments all dealt with African Americans?  What did they say? Amendments 13, 14, and 15.  Amendnent 13 deal with freeing slaves.  Amendment 14 discussed equal protection under the law. Amendment 15 addressed voting rights for black men.
18. Who was able to vote first in U.S. elections: black women or Native Americans? Black women. Native Americans did not get the right to vote in national elections until 1924.
19. Which black female talk show host became the first black woman billionaire?  What year did that first happen? Oprah Winfrey in 2004.
20. What was the inspiration for Jay-Z’s name?  Who is his wife?  The subway lines in Brooklyn.  Beyonce Knowles.

Black History Month: Studs Terkel and others talk about race.

Published in 1992, Studs Terkel's book about race informs us still.

Recently deceased Chicago icon Studs Terkel was remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which he was probably the only straight white man in both the Black and Gay and Lesbian Writers Halls of Fame.

Studs’ prolific career included multiple memoirs, work in television, a law degree-he never practiced-years and years on radio, and, of course, his oral histories. His subjects included the basic stuff of life and death: work; war; the Great Depression; and hope.

As many of the tributes that issued forth after his death just on the cusp of Barack Obama’s historic election noted, Studs had an unmatchhed ability to listen, to ask probing questions and to make people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, their stories, their souls.  He listened with equal humility and openness to all.

Despite spending the first twelve years of his life in New York, a stretch of time that disqualified him from truly being a Chicagoan, Studs loved Chicago deeply, and it loved him back.  My brother Jon did a project for Smithsonian Magazine in which he took pictures of Studs’ favorites Chicago places.  In that article, Studs asserted that Chicago was the most American of cities.

Studs also makes that claim in Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About The American Obssession.  In the book’s introduction, he writes, “Asided from a few visits elsewhere, Chicago is the locus of this work.  Of all our cities, it is America’s metaphor.”

And race is one of its most thorny topics.

Terkel interviews people from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds-a Japanese-American couple and a number of Mexican-American folks’ words appear in Race-and the core is conversations with black and white people.

Many had been interviewed before.  One of the book’s many powerful features is that Studs had interviewed these people before-in some cases, as much as 25 years earlier.  Studs notes that Timuel Black, local griot of Chicago’s black community, who is still publishing oral histories of his own at age 90,  and he rode the same bus to the March on Washington, for instance.

The book is introduced with the words of Mamie Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in 1955 during a trip to Money, Mississippi.  Mobley talks about the pain and hatred she felt toward her son’s murderers, but also about forgiveness.  From there, the work is divided into four sections, each of which has an overview and then accompanying interviews.

Chicagoans will recognize the presence of people like Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist Clarence Page and Salim Muwakkil, while aficionados of South Africa will enjoy the thoughts of Mark Mathabane and Rian Malan. Venerated civil rights activist C.T. Vivian, whose 1965 confrontation in Selma, Alabama of Sheriff Jim Clark was part of the Eyes on the Prize series, is in the book, too.

In addition to the appeal of learning from people one already knows, Race also has the benefit of hearing from people who are less publicly prominent.

Some of them have dramatic stories.

In one of the book’s most moving sections, Terkel includes the words of for former Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis and his former adversary, Ann Atwater, an African American activist in Durham, North Carolina.  Through a combination of hard times, straight talk and interpersonal contact, Ellis gives up his formerly racist views and Atwater comes to embrace the former Klansman.

Race is not a treacly story of transformation, though.

There are plenty of hard edges throughout the work.  Black people talk about being called racial epithets and their waning confidence that the country will ever give up its racism.  White people talk about their own and their family’s prejudices.  The subject of housing, educuation, jobs and community pulse throughout the book, showing that, close to 400 years after the first Africans arrived in what was not yet the United States, race continues to be a subject that bedevils the country without resolution.

The final section, Mixed, contains the words of two couples, each of which has one white and one black member, and their children.

At the end of the one of the interviews, journalist Hank de Zutter, who is white, looks at Amanda, his sleeping biracial daughter, and says, “Our daughter, who is now asleep, represents to me the embodiment of each culture … She carries a strength that neither of her parents has, because she’s the product of our daring to reach over, because we loved each other.

“She’s the future, if people realize the more we cross over, the stronger we are-as a country, as a planet.”

Stirring words, and, as always, ably elicited and recorded by the inimitable Terkel. 

Still, even as the country has elected the product of a similar union to lead our country, we would do well to look at all of the stories in Race to get the combination of bracing reality and persistent optimism that course through this and the rest of Terkel’s remarkable body of work.

Black History Month: The Senator and The Sharecropper

Chris Myers Asch explores the interconnected lives of Fannie Lou Hamer and James Eastland.

As I wrote in a post last week, Mississippi was for many years one of the most, if not the most, racially oppressive states in America.

Brutal and public lynchings attended by sizeable crowds, the comprehensive suppression of black people’s voting rights, an inferior education system, and the sharecropping system based in the land’s cotton crop all worked to keep black people in the state in a separate and thoroughly unequal position.

Efforts for and against changing Mississippi produced some of the modern civil rights movement’s most stirring moments: the gruesome face and mangled body of Emmett Till after he was pulled from the Tallahathcie River, a cotton gin tied around his bloated corpse; Gov. Ross Barnett bellowing to a  fiery crowd of Ole Miss supporters at  a, football game “I love Mississippi” before trying to stop James Merideth from entering the school; the murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman; and Merideth being shot as he sought to counter the climate of fear in the state.

In the early 1990s, Chris Myers Asch taught in Sunflower County in the northwestern part of the state as a participant in the Teach for America program.  In addition to meeting the  woman who became his wife, he also became fascinated with what he called  the state’s transformed yet “resiliently separate and unequal” nature. 

Asch realized two other iconic figures-Senator James Eastland, called by many the heart  of the segregationist movement, and Fannie Lou Hamer, sharecropper and unwavering opponent of segregation, hailed from the same county in which he was teaching.

Asch explores the lives of these two influential figures and their interaction with the times through which they lived and which they contributed to shaping in The Senator & the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer.

The book is an engaging one. 

Asch interweaves chapters about his two protagonists with the sights and scenes in the socially, but not economically, transformed Mississippi he encountered as a young teacher.   He shows how the lives of the two families were both rooted in the county’s blood-soaked land  Eastland came from plantation owning stock, while Fannie Lou Townsend was born to sharecropping parents and worked the land, too.

In the book’s introduction, Asch explains that he wanted to “get” Eastland, rather than to present him as an evil, racist and rabid anti-communist.  He largely succeeds in that attempt.  Eastland’s close relationship with his father and his comparatively liberal positions on race relations early in his career humanize the man and show that his later views were neither inevitable nor a caricature.

In a similar vein, Hamer also gets a textured treatment in which she emerges as a courageous and unyielding foe of segregation, but also a woman whose commitment to an interracial movement made her seem out of step with the times and who actually ended up disappointed, if not bitter, about the movement’s directions and incomplete gains.

In addition to providing a nuanced description of his two major characters, Asch also traces the major social and economic forces that shaped their world views and the experiences they had. 

In addition to showing the rise of the cotton economy, Asch talks about how, as a U.S. senator, Eastland fused his opposition to post-World War II black assertion and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a legitimate threat in a potent brand of anti-Communism and anti-integration that resonated with like minded people throughout the region.   He rose in authority and prominence, becoming seen not only as the voice of segregation in the 50s and 60s, but also playing a lead role in the successful opposition to Abe Fortas for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

For her part, Hamer grow in political awareness and confidence, ultimately emerging as the spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, speaking most memorably at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City.  She also uttered the oft-quoted line, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”  Her courage and unyielding commitment to full equality for all people served as an inspiration to many in the movement and beyond.

But if both Eastland and Hamer rose to become national figures, they also saw declines that left them feeling defeated, rebuked and out of synch with their erstwhile supporters. 

Eastland visited the former Rhodesia under the Ian Smith regime and talked about it as an embodiment of how his home state used to be.  In his final run for senator, he had essentially a “conversion” experience that led him to ask for, and receive, help from some of the state’s black leaders like Aaron Henry who were formerly his staunchest opponents. 

Hamer worked on farming and economic issues, but felt that she did not achieve significant success in either arena.  During the mid and late 60s, she unsuccessfully opposed the expulsion of white members from organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and ended up feeling discouraged both about her impact and about the nation’s direction.

In the end, both Hamer and Eastland pass from the scene leaving deep traces in the sand, their misgivings notwithstanding.  Both would likely view the present with unease, if Asch’s description of mid-90s Mississippi is to be trusted.

The Senator and the Sharecropper has its weak points.  Asch does tend to traffic in cliches-the phrase “hit the nail on the head” is just one example-and the switching back and forth in time can feel contrived at times. At times, one feels that in his effort to understand and not judge Eastland, he is overly deferential and even devotes excessive space to the rabid segregationist.

These blemishes aside, The Senator and the Sharecropper is a creative attempt to portray two noteworthy figures who grew up in close proximity to each other, rose to become prominent figures and died feeling disheartened about the result of their lives.  That Asch paints this portrait against the backdrop of momentous economic, political and social change that lead to the civil rights movement’s unfinished business only make the work more appealing.