Sue > Recent Status Updates

I pull the stopwatch from my toga (the best ancient Greek philosophers always carried stopwatches in their togas).

I already love the dedication to John Paul’s or Durango

They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment. It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders.

😡😡😡😡

One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate. The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own.

Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year. Of the few who got anything, their pay came to between $30 and $150 in the 1930s for a year of hard toil in the field,

Like Russia!

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out.

The southern colonel had no assignment for him, so Pershing had no choice but to wait until the following week. When he returned, he learned there would be no leadership position for him. A white officer would be chief of surgery, as it had always been.

Poor Pershing! “The new colonel was from Mississippi, and, in an instant, Pershing found himself hurled back to the South. The colonel had not been told that this colored surgeon was supposed to be in charge—.The southern colonel had no assignment for him, so Pershing had no choice but to wait.

You sleep over a volcano,
which may erupt at any moment.93 —LAURA ARNOLD, DESCRIBING
THE SOUTH IN A DEBATE
ON THE MERITS OF MIGRATION,
TWO WEEKS BEFORE SHE HERSELF
LEFT NORTH CAROLINA
FOR WASHINGTON, DC

In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year.70 Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.

Robert p Foster and I have some thing in common!

It seemed to him that for every good thing about being the teacher and principal’s son there was a bad thing to it. If he was caught running down the street, somebody would stick her head out the window and remind him who he was. “Boy, get on out the street. I’m a tell Miss Foster on you.” To further complicate

Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.”

someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.”

The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.12, 13

resistance, not knowing and not able to imagine how far the supremacists would go.

Like us immigrants today?

Not unlike European Jews who watched the world close in on them slowly, perhaps barely perceptibly, at the start of Nazism, colored people in the South would first react in denial and disbelief to the rising hysteria, then, helpless to stop it, attempt a belated

Ida Mae on white people:

energy disliking them no matter what they did but looked upon them as a curiosity she might never comprehend. She learned to give them the benefit of the doubt but not be surprised at anything involving them. This alone probably added decades to her life.

Omg!

When they closed the casket, Ida Mae thought for sure that her father was alive in there. “I still say today he wasn’t dead,” she would say three-quarters of a century later. “At that time, they didn’t have a way to know.”

Many horrible people:

Yash is humorless and docile. I don’t recognize him. It’s a great relief to get back in the car. We spend the afternoon with his uncle Percy and his aunt Sue, who are easy and delightful. They are raising their little grandson, Jared, who loves Yash as much as the pigeons

I never liked Sam…now it’s HATE. Every few weeks Sam comes to town and disturbs that happiness. He stays with Yash and I can’t go to any of the parties they go to. My name is verboten. When they are together, I don’t exist, Yash tells me. All their friends know not to mention my name.

Her mother is progressive for the 70s: On the phone my mother tells me he has a Madonna-whore complex.

“I want to believe in humans. I want to believe that even at the last second, an AI can and should be overridden by a knowing, human conscience. By a moral mind with a soul. Now I’m not so sure. There’s a place for algorithms, a bigger and bigger place. But people have to be better, too. They have to not drink and drive.

Every accident in a self-driving vehicle is huge news, because it’s covered as if a malevolent robot has killed a human. Meanwhile some random truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a young couple, yet we never once consider taking all eighteen-wheelers off the road.”

fails. Sheltered by our money and our first world comforts, we will always ignore the suffering of other, more remote people in the face of our own children’s suffering.

But if what Morrissey says is true, the same system intended to keep us safe could be deployed by the police as evidence against Charlie. Our minivan has now become a know-it-all witness holding up my family right when we need to be moving on.

Metaphor: But Tom had been stubborn about it. He’d had to put them behind him, in tow, and wait until they finally fell away, like those stages of the Saturn V separating and tumbling behind what was left of that rocket that just had to get to the moon.

Becky put her arm around Cal’s waist and drew his hip against hers. She was so scared, and sorry she couldn’t keep them down there forever, safe, playing with the trains. When they laughed, at least, they still sounded like boys.

George Lucas wrote back!

I love how she tells Basam she went to Texas to spend a week with with a man…not “a friend.”

Theodore story… Oh my. His father had a real Sophie’s choice, and as a result only he and his mother were able to escape Germany in 1941 when he was six. His father and his older brother died in Dachau.