RIP, Dix

We lost a cherished companion last night. She had been in Salemtown almost as long as we have and she was a source of great joy to our family. Good-bye, loyal friend.

RIP, John Egerton

Nashville resident and author of southern culture, John Egerton has died according to local news reports. Mr. Egerton's civil rights writing touched on the history of Salemtown with his narrative to the film, A Child Shall Lead Them. In 2009, I started blogging on the history of desegregation at Salemtown's Fehr School with an interest in getting Metro to preserve and protect that historic building as a living civil rights museum. Nearly all of my information on Fehr came from John Egerton. I can say without a doubt that Mr. Egerton made preservation of the Fehr School building possible. Please join me in grateful remembrance of John Egerton.

RIP, Ernest Campbell, civil rights academic and long-time Germantown preservationist

I just learned that the former Vanderbilt sociologist who contributed so much to North End preservation died last Sunday at his Germantown home. This is sad news about a man who was a catalyst in our community, a professor who cut a figure in US civil rights history:

While at UNC, the Campbells welcomed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to their home when the civil rights leader visited Chapel Hill. Campbell studied the educational aspirations of white and black students in North Carolina in the early 1960s and received a call from the U.S. Office of Education asking him to serve as co-director of a project resulting from a mandate in the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 to study the effects of discrimination on race, sex and religion.

The scholars focused on education achievement and race, and the resulting large-scale study of nearly 800,000 students documented huge differences in test scores and achievement by race. The research additionally documented that the Southern region lagged significantly behind the rest of the nation in terms of education, especially in regard to race. The resulting study was dubbed the “Coleman Report” after its principal author, James S. Coleman, and was published in 1966.

Germantown has changed drastically in the decades since Ernest and Berdelle Campbell launched the preservation initiatives there. Those of us who live around them enjoy the fruits of their legacy, and rest assured that some here will not fail to recall their contributions to and influence in North Nashville.

Thank you, Ernest, and goodbye.

RIP, Paul Newman

Paul Newman, actor and philanthropist, is gone. One of my favorite Newman movies is Hud. This scene is so relevant to our times:

"Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire." Hopefully, our admiration of Paul Newman might change the look for the better.

Who's the Cat Who Won't Cop Out?

Funk icon and native Tennessean Isaac Hayes has passed (born in Covington, died in Memphis).

The "hot buttered soul" has gone on.

Inventor of the Save Dies

Dean Holtzman is gone:

In 1959, [Jerome] Holtzman, then covering the Chicago Cubs, invented the statistic known as the save, which helps measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers. Mr. Holtzman’s notion was that if a pitcher entered a game with a lead and had to face the potential tying run, and he then held the lead and finished the game, he should be credited with a save.

Mr. Holtzman introduced the save in The Sporting News; in 1969, it became the first new official statistic acknowledged by Major League Baseball since the run batted in, in 1920.

Laying Tribute

George Carlin on who actually owns the United States:

The Greatest Texas Liberal is Gone

Journalist, political author and the mother-of-all-gadfly-writers, Molly Ivins, passed on today after her bout with breast cancer and at the young age of 62. This is a shattering loss, since nobody can take her place or bear her stature. To paraphrase a comment in her October 2006 Texas Observer epitaph to Ann Richards: "A-men. A-Molly."


UPDATE: The entire front of the Texas Observer webpage is currently dedicated to Molly Ivins. The editor of Creators Syndicate has a moving tribute. Here's a video remembrance from an Austin TV station.


UPDATE II: Here are a couple of great Ivins-anecdotes from this morning's New York Times to add to her lore:

In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.

She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”

But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper.

UPDATE III: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has the one tribute to Molly that everyone should read: the trials, tribulations, and fond feelings of her old editor. I'm still laughing.

In Memory of Kay

Our house is filled with sadness and saturated with spirit after my mother-in-law passed on this past Epiphany morning. Her leaving was imminent but untimely in the daily strides of those of us related to her. We are paused and reeling.

She was one of my most faithful readers and she was persistently supportive of Enclave, even though we rarely agreed on the political issues that I engage. She was generous in her praise of my writing and I tried to reciprocate by posting family pictures regularly, but solely for her benefit, because I knew she stopped by daily. I shy away from sharing my personal life in this impersonal medium full of faceless people willing to take advantage of such dispensations. But posting family pictures was always worth the risk when I knew that it would make her happy to break up my ponderous writing with bright photos of her very own family. I had no other reason.

Now that she is elsewhere, we are finding out that she had a much grander reputation in her small Missouri hometown than she let on, than we bothered to unearth. Her passing was front-page news there. The public library is going to name one of their special collection rooms for her. When I consider all of that in this relatively puny blog, then I think myself lucky to have called her my mother-in-law. But I am merely one lucky soul among a host of fortunate family and friends.

So, I owe her this one last photo of a granddaughter's love and the perpetual wish, "Godspeed, Kay."

RIP, Clifford Geertz

Whatever the ultimate source of the faith of a man or group of men may or may not be, it is indisputable that it is sustained in this world by symbolic forms and social arrangements. What a given religion is--its specific content--is embodied in the images and metaphors its adherents use to characterize reality .... Religion may be a stone thrown into the world; but it must be a palpable stone and someone must throw it.

- - Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed

I just found out that one of the more important social scientists of the 20th Century, Clifford Geertz, died last month at the age of 80. Not only did I read most of Geertz's works as a grad student, but his Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia was my first scholarly introduction to Islamic religion and its diversity. Geertz's work balances out functionalist approaches to religion with an emphasis on "thick descriptions" of culture that go all the way down into social, political, and economic mechanisms. He embodied the Weberian emphasis on interpreting cultural forms like religion so that practicioners would agree that the scientist has accurately understood their practice. He is already missed.

Sputnik Passes On

NPR recently did a great story on renowned Memphis wrestler, Sputnik Monroe, who died a couple of weeks ago. What made Sputnik famous was not just his infamous presence in the ring, but how he used his bad-guy persona to change Jim Crow era segregation in Memphis in the 1950s when the federal government would not. The Downtown Memphis auditorium where this white man wrestled was segregated, with blacks limited to the top balcony; Sputnik started bribing a ticket-counter to accept more black tickets than allotted to the top balcony. When the balcony filled, blacks had to sit in designated white seating and, when promoters didn't complain, the auditorium became desegregated from then on. Sputnik did refuse an invitation to go on one of the Freedom Rides during the Civil Rights Movement, but not because he disagreed with the goal of desegregation. He told nonviolent organizers he would have to refuse because he wasn't a "pacifist," and if someone shot at the passing buses, he would be "coming off with machine guns."

The Passing of One of the Finest Governors Ever

Governor Ann Richards of the Great State of Texas has moved on to greener pastures. I'll miss her spittin' fire wit and her ability to break down any door that was shut in her face. She once used Ginger Rogers as a metaphor for women, saying that she could do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and on high heels. As the father of two daughters, I thank Ann for making this a better world for them to do what they will. Hats off; she's passing on.

A Holy Week RIP

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., long-time pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, died on Wednesday at the age of 81. Rev. Coffin was one of the more prominent voices in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and in the anti-nuclear proliferation movement of the 1980s; he was also immortalized in the Doonesbury comic strip (Rev. Scot Sloan). Early in his life, Rev. Coffin was in a U.S. military intelligence program that forcibly repatriated Soviet citizens who had been taken prisoner, which was a service that he regretted for the rest of his life and that caused him to spend time in the CIA opposing Stalin's regime.

I had the privilege of meeting Rev. Coffin as a college student in the 1980's at the height of the anti-nuclear proliferation movement, which was about the time I grew out of my stage as a politically conservative Reagan-supporter. Rev. Coffin's writings and sermons were partly influential in my transition and I have always looked up to him as one of the giants of contemporary American Christianity.

Requiem For Kirby

Kirby Puckett--Hall of Famer and the catalyst on one of the most remarkable teams (the Minnesota Twins) in World Series history--died today at 44. Incidently, he hit .382 in his first minor league season here in Tennessee (with the Elizabethton Twins of the Appalachian League).

Very Moving Funeral Service For Coretta Scott King Today

I watched Coretta Scott King's moving funeral service today. There were some very emotional and cathartic moments. But my primary impression was that it afforded a level of national, political respect that MLK, Jr. didn't get at his death or in the years before his birthday was declared a national holiday. It is perhaps appropriate that Coretta who worked so long and hard for civil rights for all people should get it now, even though it is late in coming.

Some of my own favorite highlights: the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gave a memorable rhymed recitation, even referring to the lack of care for America's poor and working class as "Weapons of Misdirection here" in contrast to no "Weapons of Mass Destruction there," engendering a strong, standing, and sustained ovation. Maya Angelou pledged that she would never stop trying to make the world more peaceful and just so that she could see it through her eyes and "through Coretta's eyes." Former President Jimmy Carter spoke of his placement in 1974 of a portrait of MLK with Coretta inside the Georgia State House, with the Georgia Ku Klux Klan massed outside. He referred to his presidential run in 1976 when Coretta and "Daddy King" endorsed him; Mr. Carter said that their "hand shakes were worth a million Yankee votes," which drew a ringing ovation. Carter also made reference to the federal government's wire-tapping and intrusive, illegal FBI investigations of the Kings. Former President Clinton was his usual down-to-earth self, reminding the gathered crowd that Coretta was not simply a symbol, but a real woman who raised her kids and faced the frustrations of life that all of us do. Mr. Clinton stated that no one would have blamed Coretta if she had just left the Civil Rights movement the day after her husband was killed and focused exclusively on her family; but, as Clinton said, she showed up in Memphis to take her husband's place leading the poor sanitation workers in their march for Civil Rights. Clinton paralleled Coretta's response to our obligations, asking, "What are we going to do now?" He also mentioned the King Center in Atlanta and asked wealthy Atlantians what they were going to do to save the financially troubled Center now that its creator is gone, saying the "difficulty of success does not alleviate us from the obligation of acting."

All in all it was a memorable and moving service and properly due to Coretta Scott King.

We'll Never Find ...

... another love like his.

Lou Rawls, who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the United Negro College Fund and who spanned musical genres to help change the face of pop music, died of cancer today. RIP, "Natural Man."

Salemtown Business Leader Quoted In Tennessean Piece About Rosa Parks

Brooks Parker (among other Nashville leaders) eulogizes Ms. Rosa Parks in today's Tennessean.

Rest In Peace, Ms. Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks--who spent some time in Monteagle, Tennessee training in the ways of nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School before the federal government shut it down--has died at the age of 92 of natural causes. Ms. Parks is most renowned for her refusal on December 1, 1955 to give up her seat in the black section of a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus for a white man after the white section in front filled up. When the bus driver threatened to arrest her himself, she continued to refuse to give up her right to a seat in the black section, which forced him to get the Montgomery police to do so, thus, bringing greater publicity that Montgomery city officials would just as soon have avoided. Within a short time, not only did blacks win the right to ride in the black sections of public buses, they won the right to ride in any section of public buses.

Several black Montgomerians had preceded Ms. Parks in refusing to give up their bus seats to whites in 1955, but Ms. Parks was chosen as a symbol by the Montgomery movement--much like the Brooklyn Dodgers chose Jackie Robinson--as someone whose impeccable character could withstand harsh controversy, which would ensue with the Montgomery bus boycott. Taylor Branch said of Ms. Parks:

She wore rimless spectacles, spoke quietly, wrote and typed faultless letters on her own, and had never been known to lower herself to factionalism. A tireless worker and churchgoer, of working-class station and middle-class demeanor, Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got. Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths. [Parting the Waters, pp. 125].

Rosa Parks has always been a personal inspiration for my own political identity and a historical inspiration for neighborhood organizers everywhere. Thank you, Ms. Rosa Parks.