Hungry Blues

Last night I added katrina and nola categories and retagged all the relevant posts appropriately. Sorry if that wreaked havoc on your rss readers…

There are several comments that I should have responded to already. I hope to catch up soon, probably in the form of some posts since the comments I have in mind are already a little old.

By the way, I recently joined the editorial collective at Dollars And Sense. I think I’d better add D & S to my sidebar…

On Friday, I posted a first hand account of a woman who volunteered her services as a counselor for survivors of Katrina. As noted by a Samantha Joy in the comments and by J Flenn, who emailed me last night, authorship of this piece was widely misattributed to Anne Gevarsi. The true author is Shari Julian. Like Smantha, J Flenn contacted Anne Gevarsi and received the following statement, which Samantha also received and posted in the comments today:

Since Shari Julian was on Dateline Friday, I feel that I can tell you that she is my friend who donated her time working with refugees. I am NOT a psychologist, and I don’t want her ideas misrepresented as mine; PLEASE pass this on. I know that Shari will be delighted with your response to her. I do not want any of the Princes of Spin to use this mix-up against her or against me. I agreed to pass on her reflections since I have an extensive email list. Somehow, my name became associated as the psychologist. I am an English professor, so please contact Dr. Julian at the addresses in the cc line.

J Flenn also heard directly from Shari Julian, who wrote that she is:

…a Licensed Professional Counselor with a bunch of post-doctorates not a psychologist. Counseling is actually a better preparation than psychology for this work since it works with populations without pre-existing psychopathology but rather situational abreactions. I have a lot of experience with victims of mass trauma and with crime. I am an assistant professor in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UTA. …

But it appears that Hurricane Katrina has taken out the Mississippi Department of Archives and History website. None of images from Sovereignty Commission files will load until things are back on line down there.

In the meantime:

3 dead, 500,000 without power in Katrina’s wake

By John Fuquay

jfuquay@clarionledger.com

Three people are dead and more than 500,000 residents are without power as Hurricane Katrina continues to ravage the state, Gov. Haley Barbour said this afternoon.

Search and rescue operations are in action in portions of Jackson and Hancock counties, and the state’s Emergency Management Agency executive director Robert Latham confirmed three casualties.

The deaths occurred in Hinds, Warren and Leake counties, Barbour said.

Although officials have not released identities of the dead, they say that all three were killed by falling trees.

A woman in south Jackson was struck by a falling tree and died later at a local hospital, and a mobile home resident in Warren County died when a tree crushed the structure. A woman traveling on Mississippi 488 near Carthage in Leake County died when a tree hit her vehicle, officials said.

Barbour also said damage assessments from Hurricane Katrina, the Category 4 storm that slammed into the state this morning, are just beginning.

“We still don’t have specific information,” he said.

Ron Stewart of the Electric Power Associations of Mississippi said 285,000 people are without power from his association across the state.

An Entergy official said power is disrupted to about 149,000 customers.

Figures from Mississippi Power Co., which provides service to Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties on the Mississippi coast, weren’t available.

I got some fan mail today. Since Barbara doesn’t want to back up her assertions with factual evidence, I figure the point is that they will speak for themselves—as well they do.

From: Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM <xxxx@xxxx.gov>

To: minorjive@gmail.com

Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:03 PM

Subject: Cindy Sheehan

Talk about MISINFORMATION….You sir are a font of misinformation….shame on you …and shame on Cindy Sheehan for dishonoring the memory of her son…and the other patriotic and brave Americans fighting to keep this country free….you sir are a blight on this country……..SHAME on you for using this poor woman’s grief to further your own selfish goals…you are a disgrace and ought to be ashamed of yourself…you disgust me..

Thanks, Barb

I did attempt to reply respectfully and invite some dialogue:

From: Benjamin Greenberg <minorjive@gmail.com>

To: “Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM” <xxxx@xxxx.gov>

Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:09 PM

Subject: Re: Cindy Sheehan

Dear Barb,

Could you please prove your assertion about misinformation coming from me? If I am misinforming, then there must be facts I am suppressing. Without some facts to back up your assertion, you are merely hurling insults.

Ben Greenberg

Oh well . . .

From: Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM <xxxx@xxxx.gov>

To: Benjamin Greenberg <minorjive@gmail.com>

Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:56 PM

Subject: RE: Cindy Sheehan

You have merely to go to Rush or Drudge to get the REAL facts….I don’t have time to list them all here….don’t be saying Drudge is misinforming the public….I have NEVER known Drudge or Rush to misinform in ANY way, shape, or form,…perhaps it’s your left leaning mindset that makes you think that anyone on the right is “misinforming” the public…..while in fact you leftist “propagandists” are the ones doing the real misinforming …or more like NEGLECTING to report pertinent FACTS, which then slant the story to suit your agendas. …..I have seen what the “mainstream” media has tried to do the Bush administration and it sickens me …and I assure you sir…millions of Americans feel the same way…MILLIONS…witness November 2, 2004…..Hey, we are not the same” ignorant, kept in the dark” by the mainstream leftist media, silent majority, anymore…we now have Rush, Hannity, Fox and Drudge among all the conservative blogs, and talk shows all over America to keep us informed CORRECTLY now,…and mind you , yes every story has two sides….at least FOX gives BOTH sides…unlike the leftist blogs, and the mainstream media ….sorry, but take your war protesting, lame propaganda, and spew it to your brain washed little leftist groupies…I am not buying it….nor is America….

Thanks, Barb

It was tempting to publish which government agency Barbara works for, and in which city, but a person could probably lose their job doing stuff like this on the nickel of their Federal employer.

Thank you, Typepad. Sidebar is back to normal. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

Hi Ben,

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

We are installing some upgrades and rolling out new

features. In the process, we are rebuilding all Weblogs and

TypeLists.

You can read more about this on Everything TypePad:

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/

When we rebuild your site, it will correct the odd

formatting you’re seeing now.

You can check on the status of the rebuild process on our

Status Weblog:

http://status.sixapart.com/

If you are interested in speeding this process along, our

Status Weblog also lists steps to manually update your

site.

Please let us know if you have any further questions, and

thank you for your patience.

~Melissa

Still on this dial up connection, so it looks like I’ll be waiting for Typepad to fix it. . .

Things are not appearing correctly in the sidebar. Either some html in one of my posts has corrupted the template or there is something else wrong… At the moment, I’m on a dial up connection that hangs up all the time, so it may be a little while before I resolve the issue. Help ticket is in to Typepad, though…

Sorry it’s been so quiet over here. Had a bad cold last week and was also working on some writing for print publication (more on that soon).

Over Memorial Day weekend we visited my mother, and I spent some more time with my father’s papers. I brought a bunch of new papers back home, some of which will be making their way into new posts soon.

New documents include some reports dad wrote for the United Furniture Workers of America, when he was their research director in the late 50s, some issues of the Furniture Workers’ newspaper and of the Liberal News, the old newspaper of the Liberal Party of New York, and a lot of stuff relating to dad’s work on changing the NYC School Board elections over to the system of Proportional Representation. The Liberal News includes a number of articles by dad and, I am very excited to say, a first hand account by my father’s friend William Douthard (aka Meatball to Movement people) of civil rights demonstrations that he led Alabama.

Similar to how I intend my work on my father to illuminate the life of his friend Frankie Newton, I also intend to have this project include things about William, who died much too young in 1981, at the age of 33. In 1978, when I was 9, William moved to the Albany, NY area and lived with my family until his new job fell into place and he had a place to live, and we continued to spend time with him and his wife Kim and their son Kip (from Kim’s previous marriage) for the next three years, until his untimely death from a blood clot. William was a marvelous man. It’s hard to believe that when I knew him he was younger than I am now. More on William soon . . .

WTOK, Channel 11 of Meridian, Mississippi, ran a short profile of Judge Marcus Gordon, the judge for the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, which is slated to start June 13. The print version on the news story has a link that allows you to view the news segment on your Windows Media Player.

Meridian, Mississippi is the city where James Chaney was born and where Michael Schwerner had been doing civil rights work for four months before Klansmen murdered the two young men, along with Andrew Goodman. Killen is accused of having been the ringleader of the murder plot.

Apparently, reporter Wade Phillips did a quick google search to gauge the opinions of Judge Gordon from people “on the fringes of both sides.” They mention me as the counterpoint to the Nationalist Movement (sorry, no link: you can google ‘em if you’re really curious). Here’s the passage where HungryBlues makes its television debut:

“I’ve always been impressed with his fairness and unbiased conduct of trial,” said Stanley Dearman, the former editor of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper.

But not everyone agrees with Dearman. A quick Google search of his name brings up more than a hundred references. People on the fringes of both sides have less than kind things to say about Gordon.

The white supremacist Nationalist organization has called him the self-proclaimed embodiment of communist agitators, and branded him the re-incarnation of Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers killed in 1964.

On the other side, the liberal website, Hungry Blues, questioned how badly Gordon wanted to try the case after he delayed it when Killen was hurt in a tree cutting accident. That kind of criticism doesn’t seem to faze the judge.

“I have a job to do and I recognize the law, and in doing so I think sometimes people don’t understand fairness,” Gordon said.

This is the post they refer to, complete with a quick camera pan of a computer monitor while my post is on screen (screenshot above).

[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei’ach (happy holiday). –BG

As usual, while I’m here at my mom’s house, I’m sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I’m looking through some of the documents from Dad’s work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master’s thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad’s involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there’s a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I’m going to post a little from what I’ve been reading while I’m here on my Passover visit.

As I study my father’s political life I’ve been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled “Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council.” In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there’s a section called “P.R. And Civil Rights:”

P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in “ghettoes” like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.

P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough’s votes - e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough - he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.

Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.

The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed - they were not when we had P.R. before - for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)

This passage captures three important elements of my father’s political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father’s political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.

Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad’s sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can’t find Dad’s copy of the book in the house right now, so I don’t know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, “so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it’s probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . .”

Two Fridays ago (4/8), my mother called to tell me she had just talked with a retired journalist, named Jeff Prugh. Apparently Jeff had come across my posts on the Roosevelt Tatum story, and he wanted to talk with me. Between my father’s name and the mentions of Delmar, NY in the Tatum series (I called it “From Delmar to Bombingham”), Jeff figured out how to reach my mother.

Jeff called because he had researched this same story, starting three decades ago, interviewing many of the principle figures who were involved, including the likes of Macon Weaver, the US Attorney who drummed up the case against Tatum in the first place. If you haven’t followed the links, or read the posts before, Roosevelt Tatum claimed to have witnessed two Birmingham Police officers planting the bombs that destroyed AD and Naomi King’s home on the night of May 11, 1963. The Kings and their five children were in the house when the bombs went off and escaped alive only by good luck. After Tatum made his allegations and made several official statements to this effect, he abruptly retracted his testimony and was then prosecuted for false testimony. Tatum was convicted swiftly and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

Both Jeff and I—as well as Diane McWhorter—have concluded that Tatum was bullied out of his original testimony through a rigged polygraph test, administered by the FBI in Birmingham. Jeff was astonished to find my work in part because until he read this post, he’d made the same mistake that Macon Weaver had in assuming that the Greenberg mentioned in FBI documents was the famous Civil Rights Movement attorney, Jack Greenberg.

When my mother called two Fridays ago, I was lying in bed, trying to recover from a bad cold in time for a job interview on Monday the 11th. I was still under the weather all weekend, and I wanted to use my spare time to prepare for the interview, so I didn’t end up calling Jeff back until Tuesday night (4/12).

It was exciting to compare notes with Jeff because we’d reached so many of the same conclusions from our separate research and because we had each learned things that the other hadn’t. While Jeff had spoken to many of the people involved—a number of whom are now dead—I had succeeded in getting additional FBI documents on the case declassified. His research led him more deeply into corruption in Alabama regarding Tatum’s case; mine had revealed new details about what happened while Tatum was in Washington, DC with my father and AD King (the next part in the Delmar to Bombingham series, still in the works).

Jeff has done some very interesting work on Dan Moore, a federal marshall who tried to expose the rigging of the grand jury that convicted Tatum. In 1999 Jeff published his research in the Marin Independent Journal , the last paper he worked at before he retired (before that Jeff was a LA Times reporter for twenty-one years, including six as Atlanta Bureau Chief). In 2004, he published an expanded version as part of the King family memoir by Alveda King, AD and Naomi’s oldest daughter, who was twelve at the time of the bombing. Here’s an excerpt from the version in Marin Indpendent Journal:

In June [1963] while Rooselvelt Tatum is being questioned in Washington, Moore becomes incensed when [sic] learns that his boss, U.S. Marshal Peyton Norville, and Judge Allgood participate in selecting the federal grand jury that would indict Tatum.

In sworn testimony, Moore would say that he told a Washington-based official of the U.S. Marshals Service that his boss had bragged to him about putting his son-in-law on the grand jury.

A Justice Department examiner’s report in 1964 would say that “…the jury box was one name short. The then Marshal, Mr. Norville, knowing his son-in-law to be a qualified voter, wrote his name on a piece of paper and put into the box. When the Marshal returned to his office he passed this information to the Chief [Moore] in an informal conversation . . . .”

In 1964, Moore would be subpoenaed by an attorney who represented eight white supremacists and who had been tipped about Moore’s allegations that U.S. Marshal Norville had told him he had placed his son-in-law on the grand jury. The eight members of the militant National States Rights Party had been indicted by the Tatum grand jury for disrupting efforts to desegregate some of Birmingham’s schools.

After the attorney takes Moore’s deposition alleging that the grand jury had been improperly impaneled, Moore is called to Judge Allgood’s chambers, and, according to Moore, the judge tells him: “You’ve got me backed against the wall now. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Moore to Judge Allgood: “Throw ‘em all out! Dismiss all the indictments [including Tatum's]!

Amid allegations that the grand jury was tainted, the judge drops charges against the whites—publicly citing “fundamental deficiencies” in the indictment—but the judge doesn’t let Moore’s testimony impugning the grand jury get in the way of the case the feds had built against Roosevelt Tatum.

Dan Moore continues to press for propriety in the federal courthouse in Birmingham. However, he becomes persona non grata. He refuses an offer of a lifetime pension of $3,971 a year ($331 monthly) if he would retire on the spot, after nearly 20 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, and claim what he says would be a bogus disability. He would describe the offer as “a crooked scheme designed to steal public money and to cover up what I knew about obstruction of justice in the Tatum grand jury.”

***         ***         ***

Earlier the same Tuesday evening that I spoke with Jeff Prugh (4/12), I found a voicemail on my cell phone after I got out of yoga class. The call was from Bob Adamenko, an old friend of my dad’s. Back in October, Bob stumbled on Hungry Blues posts from July about Ray Charles and the 1963 concert he played in Birmingham, organized by my father, as a benefit to send Birmingham residents to the March on Washington. In the comments to one post, Bob wrote:

ben, I was a friend of your wondeful father. your mom would rebember me and my wife elaine. please call me at home. after your dad moved up to albany with the family we stayed in touch and eventually lost contact. I was on line doing some research on the liberal party and i came upon hungry blues. please call me any time. I would love to talk to you. Bob Adamenko-[phone # deleted for commentor's privacy] ps. I have the negatives of that show in birminham (emphasis added)

I called Bob immediately, of course, and we had a great, wide ranging conversation—Birmingham, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Liberal Party, CORE, James Farmer, the Lower East Side . . .

Bob had been in charge of security for the concert and had taken pictures. Bob was emphatic that I should have the negatives. “If anyone should have them, you should. They belong to you . . .”

Until last week, that was the last I’d heard from Bob. But then there he was on my voicemail, saying he’d been in the hospital again but he is doing better now and he needs my address so he can send my the pictures. I called Bob as soon as I got home from class. I couldn’t catch everything he told me about the negatives because my son Aaron (who is now two, by the way) was resisting bed time, and exuberantly showing off his command of two word phrases and multi-syllabic words as he climbed into his high chair to join me and Ruth in our ritual, post-yoga class take out.

***         ***         ***

Last Friday (4/15), I received some interesting mail: 1 oversized, padded envelope, from Jeff Prugh; 1 9 x 12 manilla envelop, from Bob Adamenko; 1 flat, cardboard mailer, 6 x 8 1/2, from Jonathan David Jackson.

Jeff sent me a copy of Alveda King’s book and a photocopy of the Marin Independent Journal article (not archived on the paper’s website). Bob sent me several contact sheets from the Birmingham negatives, a contact sheet of negatives of scenes from Washington, DC in 1963, the day before the March on Washington, two large prints, and a letter of recommendation that my dad wrote for him in 1976, while Dad was Secretary to the New York State Tax Commission. Jonathan sent me his new chapbook of poems (also see this post).

I spoke with Bob on Saturday, to tell him his envelope arrived. He told me he’s sending the negatives next.

One of the prints from Bob was a press photo (at right) from John Lindsay’s first appearance after he won the New York City Mayor’s race in 1965. Lindsay was a Liberal Republican, with a capital “L” and a capital “R.” That is, he ran in 1965 on a joint Liberal/GOP ticket. In 1965, my father was Assistant to Executive Director and Legislative Representative for the Liberal Party of New York, and he was one of the driving forces behind Lindsay’s mayoral campaign. In this victory photo, you can see the Liberal Party banner overhead. In front, from left to right, it’s Robert Adamenko, Paul Greenberg, and John Lindsay.

I’m not at all certain, but I think that might be my mother, very partially visible behind Bob’s left shoulder, standing next to Dad.

Update 7/9/05: Jonathan David Jackson’s website is down; links to it removed for now.

Some good news. Professor Steven Leibo at The Sage Colleges wrote back to me this morning to say that he thinks the thesis is still online but that the links got wrecked when the college reorganized its websites. He is on the case and will be getting back to me.

In the meantime, Peter Wagner, at the Prison Policy Initiative (see also Prisoners of the Census and PrisonSucks.com), found cached versions of the thesis web pages by searching the Wayback Machine, a resource I’d forgotten about, though I’ve used it before.

The thesis is called “We Were The Heart Of The Struggle:” Women in the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement, by Jocelyn Ulrich.

You can find an introuduction by Jocelyn Ulrich’s advisor cached here.

Here’s the contents:

Women’s Voices

Civil Rights in the U.S 1954-1965

Civil Rights in Birmingham

Virginia Volker

Lola Hendricks

Carolyn McKinstry

Deenie Drew

Viola Liuzzo

The Women of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement

Methodology

Works Cited

I took that giant mush called “Some Links” and divided it into subject areas. This also gave me the chance to fix a few links whose paths had changed since I first posted them, drop a few extraneous things, and add a bunch of links, mostly elections and voting rights related, that I’d put up on No Stolen Democracy. Also added in the Elections section are things that should have been in my mix of links a long time ago, like The Sentencing Project and VotersUnite! Note that for the most part, the link collections are not intended to be at all comprehensive: they are generally things that I’ve found while researching specific posts on this site or that I consider essentials.

Incidentally, I am not posting current material on No Stolen Democracy. At present, I am maintaining that blog only as an archive of materials relating to the grassroots movement that led to Senator Barbara Boxer joining Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones in her objection to the counting of Ohio’s electoral votes on January 6, 2005. If there’s anyone out there with some server space who’d like to host the site and save me the monthly fee on typepad, please get in touch.

My one sad discovery in doing this bit of site maintenance is that We Were The Heart of the Struggle: Women in the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement now seems to be gone from the Sage Colleges website. This was a wonderful senior thesis, consisting of oral histories from female participants in a corner of the Movement that tends to be associated almost exclusively with charismatic, male leaders. If you had the foresight to download the files or you figure out before I do how to find cached versions of the files on the Google servers or elsewhere, please email me or comment on this post. I’ve emailed the professor who is listed on what I think remains of the department site that used to host the thesis, so perhaps I’ll get a hold of it that way or possibly even get the department to put the thesis back online.

I’ve been reorganizing the links in my sidebar. Things may get a little messy over there while I publish the new layout.

So I said I was going follow my Miscounting Prisoners post with two more posts, to make a three part series for Black History Month. I’ve been working on Part 2 on and off, but I got into my Hungry Blues series (I, II, III), which has it’s own relevance for Black History Month. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll finish the Miscounting Prisoners series before February is up, though there is still the weekend… Anyway, no matter, since explorations of Black history should always spill out over the bounds of the official twenty-eight days .