Sorted by date Results 26 - 31 of 31
In last week’s column I introduced you to the so-called “Jefferson Bible,” to the “cut-and-paste” Bible, to The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, to Thomas Jefferson’s 86-pages-long filtering of what he took to be the most salutary, the most believable passages from the four Gospels of Luke, Mark, Matthew and John. Jefferson having revealed its existence virtually on his deathbed in 1826, how do we come to know this work? How do we come to know great books in the first p...
"We cater to white trade only"; this was the frequent attitude of American hotels and restaurants during the Jim Crow era. Mark S. Foster quotes a Black motorist in the early 1940s about an early afternoon, emotional, psychological "small cloud" that, in the late afternoon, "casts a shadow of apprehension on our hearts and sours us a little. 'Where', it asks us, 'will you stay tonight?'" Is there room at the Inn for us Blacks? Enter The Green Book. Conceived in 1932 and...
Last week I introduced The Green Book. Published by Mr. Vincent Hugo Green, an African-American U.S. Postal Service worker in New York, in 1936, it ran until 1966. The Green Book helped African-Americans travel slightly more safely during the era of Jim Crow laws. African-Americans bought and drove their own cars partly to get away from segregated cars, buses, ferries, trains and aeroplanes. Kathleen Franz, in “African-Americans Take to the Open Road,” quotes George Sch...
Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr and other terrible comics like to claim that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” is a hoax and that, owing to the fact of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, America is a “post-racial” country. Freedom is the law of the land! Go anywhere. Do anything. Imagine for a moment, however, that you’re a 33-year-old African-American long-haul trucker from Anniston, Alabama, in 1947. You haven’t slept in two days, you’re tired of sleeping under your truck...
Go Ask Alice sold millions, but who was "Alice?" How did the publisher get ahold of her diaries? Was the interlocutor really a "child psychologist?" As questions began to emerge in the late '90s, by then, we'd lived through Richard Nixon's "War on Drugs," Ronald Reagan's D.A.R.E. classes and Nancy Reagan's "Just Say 'No'" campaigns. Rick Emerson's Go Unmask Alice (BenBella Books, 2022) took the "bright, shiny object" of Go Ask Alice down a rabbit-hole. Beatrice Sparks, born...
The real author of Go Ask Alice, not “Alice” and not “Anonymous, but a disaffected Mormon mom from Utah, Mrs. Beatrice Sparks, has the fictive diarist try her best to “stay away from drugs,” to “keep away from boys,” but drugs. “Alice” (never named) gets clean--and then relapses. She goes to j ail--and gets out. On probation, she’s caught in a police raid--then gets out and runs away. She hitchhikes with Doris--also a victim of drug-use and sexual abuse. She does more drugs, r...
