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You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 2, 2008 at 3:12 pm
My new tumblelog has arrived at http://minorjive.net (feed).
A while ago I decided to set up another Wordpress blog as a tumblelog, to keep clippings of web content that I come across on the web. I didn’t like the limited functionality of the popular hosted Tumblr service, so I thought it would be better to have my own setup. I really like the T1 Wordpress theme, designed for tumbleloging, and the QuickPost plugin, which allows you to post on the fly, as you surf. But each Wordpress installation is work to maintain, and I was having trouble finding time to fully customize my setup. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when QuickPost stopped working right. I never got around to diagnosing the problem and I therefore simply stopped posting the the tumblelog. The site devolved into an archive of my twitter posts, which publish to the tumblelog automatically each night.
In the meantime, Tumblr added some of the features I wanted (namely an audio content type and (sort of) tagging), and I started to think that less might be more, especially when less includes less site maintenance work for me. I’m still waiting for tagging to be fully functional, and I’d like to see commenting. But the main thing is that I find myself using and enjoying my Tumblr site.
So again the link:
http://minorjive.net (feed)
The tumblelog subscription and site links in the sidebar now point to my Tumblr site. After I recycle the content from the old site that I want to keep, I will retire it from the internet.
(If you’re unclear on the tumblelog concept, try the classic explanation by kottke or the more recent one by Brian Oberkirch.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 16, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I’ve put the tumblelog into maintenance mode while I am making some changes to it. Among other things I’m messing around with Twitter integration. If you’ve subscribed to the RSS feed, you’ll see my tests. Sorry about that.
UPDATE 10/8: Hungry Tumblin is back online. I’m still working out a few of the details (getting categories to display, customizing global navigation, etc.), but that will all be working soon. The main change is that I’ve changed themes to T1. It’s got more content types than TumbleJack, the previous theme, and there is one in particular that I’ve been able to adapt for my tweets (what’s a tweet?). I’m loving the stylish new look and am having fun with the randomly rotating header images.
Oh yeah: I’m on twitter as minorjive. (If you were following my private tweets previously, note that I’ve still got the old account going, too, but I’ve changed the username.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 7, 2007 at 2:04 am
http://hungryblues.net/tumblin (feed)
What’s a tumblelog? People often cite kottke’s early definition (early as in 2005), in which he says:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness … with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing … really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
With much less time to write on Hungry Blues but a lot of time still spent on the web, I’ve been really drawn to tumblelogging. For the last several weeks, I’ve hesitated to start, however, because I wanted my tumblelog to have a little more functionality than the most readily available tumblelog implentations—tumblr, a free, hosted tumbling platform, and gelato, which aspires to be the Wordpress of tumblelogging software. Mainly I wanted tagging and search, so I can find stuff after I’ve posted it and collect stuff with particular projects or interests in mind.
So here’s what’s under the hood of my tumblelog:
- A separate Wordpress installation.
- Tumblejack theme to give Wordpress that tubmblelog look and feel, with stylized presentation of the 4 main content types (link/text, quote, photo, video). For another WP tumblelog theme definitely check out Matt Herzberger’s MH_Tumbler theme.
- Josh Kenzer’s recently released Quick Post plugin, which allows me to post the different content types and tag them on the fly, as I surf the web, without ever going into the Wordpress back end or a desktop editor.
Aside from a few very small tweaks to the header template, that’s pretty much it.
Now that I’ve got it all up and running I’m totally digging it. I’d sort of like to do something with all that black space to the right of the sleek, narrow tumblelogging column, not sure what though, especially since I want to keep the thing light weight and minimal and not slow it down with a lot of extra blog features. One thing I’d like to see in a future release of Quick Post is the ability to add new tags on the fly, without having to navigate the WP back end.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 1, 2007 at 9:10 am
Things may look funky for a bit. We’ll be back to normal soon.
UPDATE 7/26:
Things are pretty much back to normal. Deal was that I upgraded my Wordpress theme from the original veryplaintxt install to the developer’s latest version. I had put off upgrades for a long time because I had made a bunch of hacks to the original theme before I knew enough to document my changes to the style sheet and templates. I finally bit the bullet and made the upgrade and reverse engineered my previous hacks (with a little help from a friend with better coding skills than mine).
I can’t say everything is exactly the way it was before, but it’s close enough and I am quite pleased. The code and/or the css of the latest version of veryplaintxt is cleaner than it was before and plays much nicer with my plugins (Alex King’s Share This finally works the way it was supposed to!). But, being a big time novice when it comes to CSS, I so preferred the style sheet on my original install of the theme, with the different types of styles divided out into commented sections. I was pretty much at sea when it came to figuring out some things that I had previously been able to accomplish with much less knowledge than I have now. Anyway, I may still make a few more tweaks, as well as some other external improvements (e.g., my shiny new RSS feeds top of the sidebar). Many thanks, P, for your help!
I know I must be boring some of my usual readers to pieces by now. I have long contemplated whether I should write about tech stuff since I’ve become increasingly pre-occupied with it and it is a major part of my paid work these days. Thanks for listening.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 22, 2007 at 1:25 am
I made a bad decision when I used the phrase “Voodoo Scientists” in the title of my post on Katherine Eban’s latest article. I was picking up on a quote from Michael Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.’s International Terrorism Operations, who said that US torture tactics are based on “voodoo science.”
Voodoo as an adjective evokes classic mischaracterizations of the many thousands of years old religion as a grotesque form of black magic involving dark skinned witch doctors who preside over zombies and dolls and stick pins.
He is always a sinister figure with supernatural powers operating on temporal margins of normal society. His supernatural powers come from ancient, suppressed, occult traditions often of a non-western origin.
Add to this the African origins of Vodou (or Vodoun), and its deep roots in Haiti, and the racist overtones are all too evident. Many of the persistent racist tropes projected onto Vodou were spelled out in 1929 in The Magic Island by William Buehler Seabrook:
And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked nearby, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.
I really should have known better and I apologize.
More information on Vodou:
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 19, 2007 at 2:25 am
Someone on a computer at the Georgia Board of Regents/Dept. of Education spent about 15 minutes on this site and left a “white power” comment on this post, which I am holding in moderation. I hope the commenter does not actually work for the Georgia Board of Regents, since the agency probably does not want their employees leaving racist blog comments from BOR computers and on BOR time. The site visit occurred during between 12:07 and 12:22 PM. The IP number of the computer that was used to leave the comment is 168.9.35.14 and is running Windows XP. WHOIS info on my racist visitor is here.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 27, 2007 at 12:42 pm
My apologies to the several of you who posted comments this afternoon. Gmail’s spam filter does not seem to like the automated email notifications my blogging software sends me when I have new comments. Your comments are now all live on this site.
If you have never commented on Hungry Blues before, your comments are held in moderation for me to approve them. Once I approve your first comment, any new comments you post will publish to the blog immediately, without my intervention. This helps ward off comment spam.
(To the technically inclined Wordpress users out there: have you been having similar problems with gmail and comments? The announcement for the new version of Wordpress (2.2) note that the internal mail functions have been switched to phpMailer. Anyone have any ideas about whether phpMailer could be causing the problem and, if so, is there a suggested hack to make it play nice with gSpam?)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 25, 2007 at 1:39 am
Things may look funky for a bit, but we’ll be back to normal soon.
UPDATE: Upgrade to Wordpress 2.2 is now complete. Everything seems to have gone okay. If blog functions seem broken or things seem to be working strangely, please let me know.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 17, 2007 at 7:52 pm
David Ridgen is a documentary film maker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve mentioned him before in passing because he has been making a documentary film about the Henry Dee and Charles Moore murders case, called Mississippi Cold Case.
David Ridgen also sometimes contributes to written CBC news articles. David Ridgen wrote to me recently to let me know that he co-wrote the CBC article that confirmed that Franklin County Advocate publisher Mary Lou Webb is the widow of David Webb, former publicity director of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. I was critical of the CBC article, and of a Clarion Ledger article which repeated the information about David Webb four days after the CBC, because I had published this information about six weeks earlier and neither the CBC nor the Ledger cited me as a source.
David Ridgen wanted me also to know that he had found the same information about David Webb at least as early as May 2006. That is the download date he has on his copy of the document from the Sovereignty Commission files that I cited. David also forwarded a June 9, 2006 email to his editor Michael Hannan, which contained portions of the Mississippi Cold Case script dealing with David and Mary Lou Webb (but did not make the final cut).
Clearly I was wrong, and I apologize for insinuating that David and his co-author were dishonest about their sources.
I still think the phrase “document obtained by CBC News” is misleading, since the document is publicly available in the online Sovereignty Comission files. But David wanted to distinguish between the research he provided from the style of the article which was largely his co-author’s. I accept this distinciton, given the care that David took to document his earlier knowledge of the David Webb’s APWR affiliation.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 18, 2007 at 2:08 am
I always feel guilty when I don’t blog for more than a week or two, and now I’ve just learned that one of my favorite state legislators has put Hungry Blues on a list of blogs that her staffers are supposed to follow. What an honor, but now I feel even a little more guilty…
Anyway, the reason that I haven’t been posting much, and that when I have it’s largely been YouTube videos, is that I’ve been deep into research for an article on the 1964 murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore in southwest Mississippi (background in Jackson Free Press and Clarion Ledger). I’m not yet on deadline for the article, but I’m also presenting on my research at Harvard Law School at the end of this month. (Local friends: my session at the conference is closed to the public. Sorry I can’t invite you.)
I’ve blogged about the Dee-Moore case a couple of times since the indictment in January of James Ford Seale, one of the alleged perpetrators. In one post, I turned up evidence that suggests that some locals from Meadville, MS who have been critical of the mainstream press’ treatment of the case are at best dishonest and at worst participants in a cover up. In the couple of weeks that followed my post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Clarion Ledger each separately confirmed my core finding: Mary Lou Webb, publisher of the Franklin Advocate, is indeed the widow of the same man whom I found listed as Publicity Director for Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, thought by the FBI to have been a front group for the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Webb practically gloats over the fact that the mainstream press bought the lie that James Ford Seale was dead.
Webb said Seale had been laying low for a while, and it was possible that some people might have thought he died.
“I honestly don’t think the majority of the people did,” she said.
If most people knew that Seale was just “laying low for a while,” then why didn’t Franklin County Sheriff James Newman assist US Attorney Dunn Lampton in his investigation and let him know that a prime suspect was available for questioning in Roxie? One also wonders why Dunn Lampton didn’t bother to check the death records to confirm the false reports of Seale’s death, spread by the Klansman’s son. Same question about the death records should be posed to the NY Times, CBC, Clarion Ledger and all the rest.
What I found disappointing about the CBC and the Ledger’s treatment of the information about David Webb was that neither acknowledged that the first report of it was by an independent blogger. My source was a document in the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files, available to all online. Yet the CBC referred to the document as “A document obtained by CBC News ,” as if someone leaked it to them exclusively. Though the Ledger’s Jerry Mitchell didn’t bend over backwards to pretend he’d specially “obtained” the document on Webb, he also was silent about the earlier findings.
In a discussion thread at the Jackson Free Press, I said further that
the FBI documents referred to in the CBC and CL articles are all publicly available on the ABC News website. In other words, the only thing new that anybody did was ask Mrs. Webb for comment.
It’s definitely valuable that the CBC and CL pulled more info together and published it; but I think it’s a disservice to all when they mystify the nature of their information. Aside from my vein [sic] desire to have Hungry Blues quoted or cited in the mainstream news, this sort of half-truth telling about sources discourages people from thinking they can learn the truth for themselves.
While I’m mentioning my personal connection to the Clarion Ledger’s (generally excellent but narrow) coverage of the James Ford Seale indictment, let me also direct you to Jerry Mitchell’s recent story about white supremacists who have been rallying in support of Seale.
Reputed Klansman James Ford Seale may have drawn criticism from some, but in white supremacist circles, he’s being lauded as a patriot and a prophet.
The April issue of All the Way, a white supremacist magazine in Mississippi, features Seale on its cover. His black-and-white police mug shot has been colorized, giving him blue eyes and red hair to match the flags in the background….
Richard Barrett, who produces All the Way and heads the Nationalist Movement in Mississippi, said that letter “will go down in history next to the 95 theses that Martin Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenburg in 1517 – if the onslaught of communism in our country is overcome, and that’s a big if.”
I’ve been enjoying the pleasure of getting the comments on my posts about James Ford Seale spammed with the full text of paeans to Seale by Barrett and his Nationalist cohort.
If you want to read something related to all of this that is much more interesting than what the Nationalist Movement thinks of James Ford Seale, then check out Donna Ladd’s recent tour de force, “Fighting Back in Klan Nation,” about the late Reverend Clyde Briggs, who was at the helm of the local African American resistance to white domination and violence in Franklin County in the 1950s and 1960s.
For something a little lighter, please enjoy the following, which was discovered in the process of attempting to appease my four-year-old’s voracious appetite for YouTube videos of the Beatles.
[youtube]RFdpVsvZJ_8[/youtube]
More sooner, I hope.
UPDATE: Please see my Apology to David Ridgen
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 9, 2007 at 12:05 am
My new article came out today in the Black Commentator. Here is the opening section:
The Black Commentator
September 21, 2006 – Issue 198
Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson?
by Benjamin Greenberg
Guest Commentator
Jimmie Lee Jackson did not live to see his grandfather, Cager Lee, finally receive a voting card in his early 80s at the Marion, Alabama Town Hall, August 20, 1965. The day came just two weeks after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law by President Johnson. Congress might not have passed the law in 1965 without the pressure it felt as the whole world watched the spectacle of the Selma to Montgomery March five months earlier.
Jimmie Lee Jackson died on February 26, 1965 from injuries sustained a week prior, during the violent response by state and local police to a night time civil rights demonstration in Marion. His death was never properly investigated. No one was ever charged. He was twenty-six years old.
In 2005, Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson reopened the Jimmie Lee Jackson murder investigation. At the end of August, responding to public pressure and a formal request from the District Attorney, Alabama Governor Bob Riley issued a $5000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the 1965 case. “The person responsible for this murder should be brought to justice,” Riley said.
Governor Riley’s public statement on Jimmie Lee Jackson was delivered by his press secretary, Jeff Emerson, as a recorded message on the answering machine of journalist Kenneth Mullinax. Mullinax published the Governor’s remarks in the Montgomery Advertiser on August 29. “The entire statement was maybe two sentences,” Mullinax wrote to me in an email. Emerson has not returned any of my repeated calls requesting a written statement from the Governor on Jimmie Lee Jackson.
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death inspired a determined throng of activists to attempt the dangerous march from Selma to Montgomery. The marchers had originally planned to deliver Jackson in his coffin to Governor George Wallace at the capitol in Montgomery. Their march for Jimmie Lee Jackson became the march for voting rights, which won Cager Lee his voting card, but won no justice for his dead grandson.
For the next week, you can read the rest here for free.
UPDATE: “Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson” is now archived here, on the Hungry Blues site.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 21, 2006 at 8:52 pm
A couple of months ago I had my first exposure to Mark Mulcahy’s music. The venue was PA’s Lounge a little room that is adjunct to a little bar in Union Square in Somerville, MA.
Mulcahy is famous to some for his work in his old band Miracle Legion. I’d never heard any of his stuf before. I was there because my friend Dana was opening for him. She had made a point of telling me how great Mulcahy is, but I had no idea what to expect.
Quickly I was blown away by the crazy intelligence and surprising beauty of the peformance—faux sloppy, effortlessly various and changeable. And what a voice. It was just Mulcahy on guitar along with a bass player and a drummer who each sometimes doubled on other instruments. For a few songs there was also a keyboard player.
A ways into the set Mulcahy took his hands off his guitar and he and the bass player and drummer applied their voices, just their voices, to this song. You could hear the sounds from the bar, separated from the lounge by a wall and a hallway. But the performance space was silent while the three men sang this. The sounds of the bar and pretty much everything else in Somerville dropped into the background.
I wish I had a recording of that performance that night at PA’s, but this mp3 will have to do.
Don’t Talk Crazy (4:59, 5.7 MB – click on the little blue triangle to listen)
UPDATE (9/7): On request of Mark Mulcahy’s management I have removed access to this mp3. The song is currently for sale on the iTunes music store (requires iTunes).
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 4, 2006 at 9:29 am
The website that I’ve been developing for work, and which I’ve been working on very intensely for the last couple of weeks, is now live.
The site is for the 2006 Physicians for Human Rights National Student Conference:
Defending Dignity: The Power of Health Professionals as Human Rights Advocates
The conference is on Saturday, November 4, in Boston, at the Tufts University School of Medicine.
If you know any health professional students who might be interested, send them the url, http://defendingdignity2006.org.
Special thanks to dNb for his help with hacking Tarski, the theme (Wordpress speak for design templates) I used for the site.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 27, 2006 at 10:19 am
I just discovered that in her recent publication in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy Melanie Campbell cited my article on voting rights for New Orleans evacuees.
Benjamin Greenberg reported in his In These Times article on 17 November 2005, that there are roughly 219,000 New Orleans evacuees who are voting age [over the age of 18] and estimates that 70 percent of those are Black, which represents 153,300 Black voters who will not have access to the ballot in the 2006 elections. “This is voter disenfranchisement by attrition,” states Greenberg (Greenberg 2005).
(Melanie Campbell, “Right of Return Means Access to the Ballot, Access to Neighborhoods,and Access to Economic Opportunity [pdf],” Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, Volume XII (2006).)
My same article was also cited in congresssional testimony by Wade Henderson, Executive Director Leadership Conference on Civil Rights:
HOUSE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE “VOTING RIGHTS ACT: EVIDENCE OF CONTINUED NEED [pdf]” MARCH 8, 2006.
Maybe I’m bragging a little, but it’s great to find that my work has had some lasting value.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 23, 2006 at 12:59 am
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