Launch!
I've decided to delete the very few posts I've kept at this site and re-launch it. It will contain new posts plus a variety of things I've written in the past. It feels kind of liberating to re-launch this blog because I have always used blog platforms that were connected to political discussion boards, which limited what I could write about. I'll still use those platforms, but link to this site. Instead of being limited to the daily grind of politics, it feels like I can write about some of my other obsessions -- like amateur astronomy of the night sky, Japanese film, the origins of soul food, and idiosyncratic things like that.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
posted by HamdenRice at
2:16 AM
2 Comments:
Hamden Rice,
After reading your remarkable piece on MLK earlier this morning, I have been trying to find more of your writing online. I hope you will make more of your work public soon.
Also, this. This morning on the way to school, my daughter complained that she would hear the same things about MLK in school today that she heard last year and the year before. When she comes home this afternoon, I will read her your piece.
Dear Mr. Rice,
I quite agree with you, from your point of view, that Brother Martin transformed the existence of black Americans, but he certainly transformed it for me, and I'm not black. One of the best friends of my life hurt my feelings at a party at her house by saying "Everyone knows Eileen is a racist." When we were alone in the kitchen, I demanded an explanation, and she smiled and said "I thought you missed that. What I said was 'Everyone knows Eileen is RACELESS.'" Nobody has ever said anything nicer to me.
She was studying under Howard Zinn at Spelman and I was working in Washington in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus (we met only decades later when both of us lived in Paris and worked at Unesco). It was one of the things that made us friends immediately when we met, having shared that experience, she in Atlanta, me in DC. We were both supporting the people of Montgomery. Brother Martin fished Rosa Parks out of jail and they started a bus boycott and lunchroom sit-in movement that we ALL joined. You'll be interested to know that Washington was turned into a village. The buses were empty and the streets full of pedestrians walking toward the government offices. If you had a car you picked people up. If you didn't someone maybe picked you up. But the buses in DC had never had that silly law (as far as I knew) that it depended on your suntan where you sat on a bus. I learned it the hard way when I visited my aunt in Arlington and couldn't believe (until the driver pointed it out) that I was doing anything wrong by sitting at the back of a bus.
I left Washington in December, almost sorry I had ever made the decision, and after a few years moving around when the wind blew, I ended up in Paris, where I still am. But in 1963, I took my husband and 13-month-old son to the US to meet his inlaws, and we happened to be in Arlington visiting my aunt when Brother Martin extended his influence to include everybody, whatever color you were. He said "I have a dream," yes. But much MUCH more important, he said "And I see it realized before my very eyes. There you are, like salt and pepper, just as you should be." It was true, Mr. Rice. I was THERE. There were THOUSANDS of us, and we bumped into each other on purpose so we might smile, and bow, and apologize, and hug each other with our eyes. I know how it feels to live in a world at peace. A world of love. It was pure luck that John F. Kennedy was our president when Martin Luther King was our prophet of peace. I heard a press conference on the radio where JFK was accused of kowtowing to the Communists, who were, the reporter said, behind the March. Kennedy said "You can call anything Communist you don't want to do. We have no reason to believe the Communists are involved, and these people have the right to express their situation." I paraphrase.
He told the police to just keep the bunch of people waving swastikas -- and carrying baseball bats -- on the other side of the bridge. I saw them there when my husband and young cousin (with my baby in the back seat) left me to cross the bridge to the Lincoln Memorial, and I confess I was a little frightened. They never came across, and the event was maybe the most beautiful, hopeful, fulfilling hour of my life. I HEARD Brother Martin say his dream was realized, and I was part of it.
Please don't ever believe, Mr. Rice, that Brother Martin didn't love, respect, and include every human being on earth in his philosophy and activism. I know I was included. I know what literal, palpable Love in the Air feels like. I have lived for one hour in a world of thousands, at peace. I know it's possible. I've never been the same since.
Thanks for reading me, if you did.
eileen
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