Hungry Blues

This video short about the Old Negro Space Program provides yet another vantage point from which to consider the recent US election. It was a different time. More info available here.

"I guess if we ignore it, it'll probably go away" by like_shipwrecks (Nicole).

This is Nicole. She is one of the many talented photographers whose work I follow on flickr.

The same night that the country voted for a Black president, majorities of voters voted against gay families and the rights of gay people in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas.

Nicole is angry and so am I.

We are PEOPLE. We are not an alien race. We are not a cult. We are people, with lives, jobs, families, and feelings. We are constructive members of society and to deny us of rights that all PEOPLE should have is just WRONG.

Voting against us is not going to make us or the issues disappear. We're not giving up. We're fighting back. We aren't going anywhere.

We didn't vote away racism and we didn't vote away other bigotry and inequality, and these votes against GLBT people were one of this Election Day's ugliest demonstrations of what we have not yet overcome.

In California it's been saddening to also see another demonstration of what we have not yet overcome as some protesting the bigotry of Proposition 8 have been directing their anger at Black Californians. The thinking and behavior is racist---and it's wrong-headed to target a particular group as responsible for the fearfulness of a cross-section of the electorate.

My friend Adina pointed out that whether you're talking about the possible inappropriate participation of the Mormon Church in political organizing for Prop 8 or the possible votes of some Black voters for Prop 8, the fight really lies elsewhere.

But let's be real here---there was 49% turnout in San Francisco County and 55% turnout in Alameda which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. There was 59% turnout in San Mateo county. If we the supporters of marriage rights for all had done a better job of helping our neighbors and friends to vote, the result would have gone the other way. The result was in many respects a failure of execution. I care much less about yelling at Mormons and much more about turning out allies and persuading people on the fence about justice for all.

This is precisely how Obama won out over the fearfulness that could have prevented many more people from voting for him. We need to help the people who want to support us to follow through and we need to reach out to the people we can influence. That kind of reaching out is infectious and is what will win the day. It will win elections---but more importantly it will win us the community we need to move forward as a society.

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - This Land Is Your Land [ 4:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By Rebecca Thal

We were way back in the crowd, on a patch of the lawn where it was possible to see the jumbotron only from tiptoe, and completely impossible to see the stage. So, when my flexed toes finally gave out, while Barack Obama's words resonated around us, I kept myself occupied by looking around at the people standing packed around me.

There was the middle-aged Black lady to my right, absorbed alternately in clasping her hands in reverent disbelief and cheering boisterously. When McCain, in his concession speech, spoke of the historic moment of electing our first African-American president, she shouted, "That's RIGHT!" and shook her head fervently, eyes wide and rimmed with tears.

There was the grandmother behind me, who dialed up some family member on her cell phone and held it out up over the crowd to hear, saying only, "Listen. This is live."

And there was the couple in front, two men dressed in vests for a night much warmer than this one. The shorter of the two had a view of the TV screen and was leaning over someone else's shoulder to watch. His partner stayed still, not looking up to the screen, just shaking his head and weeping. He kept it up all through Obama's speech. He kept having to remove his glasses to wipe his eyes.

So that's it. That's how it was, in Grant Park, with hundreds of thousands of people on the eve of the election. There was no riot and there was no ruckus. People were too busy to riot, and what they were busy with was crying.

Not that it wasn't also celebratory. As the crowd dispersed I found myself on the receiving end of vehement handshakes from all sorts of strangers---congratulations, they said, and I told them "you too" since I didn't know how better to respond.

On the bike ride home, going south on King Drive, every car that passed leaned on its horn. "Obama!" the drivers would shout, waving their arms out the windows. "Obama!" we yelled right back, at stop signs and to people out on porches and to kids outside the convenience store. It was like nobody could believe their luck. We had to keep shouting it back and forth to each other, to affirm it---yes, this is real, and it's not going to go away. It's happening to us, now.

And already I can feel the cynic in myself mobilizing. There's a time for that---a certain spirit of political skepticism that I tend to think of as healthy---but for now, just for the moment, I am holding it off. I think we just witnessed something big, and I'm not going to pass my quick judgment on that. It has been too long coming.

Rebecca Thal is a student at the University of Chicago.

Have you seen the new one from will.i.am yet?

Our election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America has been filling me with overwhelming emotions. As it has been doing for so many people.

It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.

I started this blog to write about my father's history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I've made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.

It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President---in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America's embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack's two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House---is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.

This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades---but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don't know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama's candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.

One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I've gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women's studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:

Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama

I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don't know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don't know if the numbers will allow us to call him "President Obama" but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.

I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:

Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.

I think Fanon's words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.

With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it's about US.

I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It's not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits....

Let's hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.

May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.

On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.

John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement  there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi---the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John's wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

My subject line to John was "Congratulations to us all."

I'm thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.

John replied in a vein similar to Joyce's blog post:

Like John Lewis---as Obama has said---my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.

Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.

And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying "I," and Obama saying "You."

So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. "To Come This Far." Now it is your turn. So I agree---"Congratulations to us all."

Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation's woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.

A new opentape for you all.

If you are in Massachusetts, please vote NO on Question 1 this Tuesday. Question 1 is a dangerous, binding proposal to repeal the state income tax, effectively cutting the state budget by $12 billion or almost 40%.

http://votenoquestion1.com/

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.

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(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)