Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 136 of 147)

Blood Done Sign My Name (orangepolitics.org version)

William F. Winter former governor of Mississippi recently reminded the Seminar for Southern Legislators that 1970 was a watershed year. “[A] remarkable group of so-called New South governors had been elected across the South. Running on platforms promoting racial equity, educational quality and economic development, they brought a new tone to the political arena which had been dominated for so long by the one issue of race. Their names would soon be known across the nation — names like Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, John West of South Carolina, and Linwood Holton of Virginia.”

But Tim Tyson, who was only 10 years old at the time and living not far from Chapel Hill in Oxford NC, saw a different world. The murder of black veteran Henry Marrow sparked riots and burnings and marches, showing that racial equality was far from a done deal.

Haunted by the murder story and having become in the meantime a historian (after a stint at Crook’s Corner), Tyson visited and revisited his former home town of Oxford, putting together a history of the events in the still divided town. A history that some had actively tried to erase and rewrite.

The murder is not mystery, but many mysteries surround the murder. Blood Done Sign My Name is compelling, personal, local, particular, broad and always interesting. The book also calls on us to continue to confront our shared racial problems.

The contenders for the UNC Summer Reading Program are good books as well. Tracy Kidder’s book on Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, will be the Carrboro community read. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi has won several important literary awards since it was first published. But neither of those books can compare with the power and the insistence of the history of Oxford and of Henry Marrow as told by Tyson.

I’m hoping that the Summer Reading Program will inspire future historians, some UNC students who are incoming this fall, to visit the rich resources of the Southern Oral History Collection. There they will find oral histories recorded by Eddie McCoy of Oxford who gives us more background of Oxford, the murder and the lives there before and after.

Notes:

Sally Greene and I have blogged about Blood Done Sign My Name over the past year and have had the privilege of chatting with Tim Tyson, who is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center this year.

Amazon reviews.

The official UNC Press Release about the Summer Reading Program is here.

WUNC’s State of Things featuring Tim Tyson

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featuring Tyson and Juan Williams
revisiting Oxford

UNC Summer Reading – Blood Done Sign My Name

The Summer Reading Committee has just reported in. The choice for incoming students and the UNC community for the Summer of 2005 is Tim Tyson‘s Blood Done Sign My Name.

I’ve written a lot about Tim and the book and about the NPR and UNC State of Things shows on the topic.

The UNC announcement reads:

The 2005 Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee has chosen “Blood Done Sign My Name” by Timothy B. Tyson for this year’s reading program for our incoming undergraduate students in August.

On behalf of our committee of students, faculty and staff, I write to thank the University community for your help in this selection process. We received suggestions from more than 224 people about books, types of books or general topics that covered a diverse group of topics, authors and viewpoints. That input resulted from a campus-wide email, online postings to the reading program Web page (www.unc.edu/srp/) and recommendations from alumni, members of the general public, and others sent to the chancellor’s office. We considered those suggestions and developed others through our deliberations.

Our committee concluded that “Blood Done Sign My Name” was an especially appropriate selection for a program that asks our new students to focus on discussion and dialogue about a compelling topic. We believe that the questions and issues raised by this book will provide many excellent opportunities for our new students to have thoughtful conversations in their discussion groups.

Published in 2004, “Blood Done Sign My Name” was written by Tyson, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who grew up in eastern North Carolina as the son of a Methodist minister.The author, who earned his Ph.D. at Duke University, traces his own experiences, including living in Oxford, N.C., as a white 10-year-old in 1970. That is when the murder of Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, ignited an explosive chapter in the history of racial conflict in North Carolina.

Our committee members felt that Tyson’s story was engaging and fearlessly shared his own emotions and insights about how a white person was touched by the racial tension that permeated the Jim Crow South. In recommending the book, we hope that Tyson’s candor will inspire readers to confront the fears and emotions that often attend discussions of race and to engage in a secure and energizing dialogue informed by historical clarity.

The committee’s second and third choices, respectively, were “Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer,” by Tracy Kidder, and “Life of Pi,” by Yann Martel.

Our committee has worked extremely hard since last fall to represent the Carolina community. We are grateful for the support on campus for the book selection process and for this program. Additional information about this year’s program will continue to be updated at http://www.unc.edu/srp/

Holden Thorp, Professor of Chemistry
Chair, Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee


The official UNC Press Release
just came out as well.

SNOW!

Here in the South, that’s news. Especially when the day-time temperatures were in the 70s last week! YIKES
Only flurries, but it’s the idea of the stuff.
UPDATE: Sticking and building up! Yankee arrogance about how to drive, how to walk, etc soars! Southerners rush to groceries to buy white – eggs, bread, milk, toilet paper all vanish from the shelves!

What was used – National Journal and Duke Moving Image

“One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future,” said Paul Jones, director of the public digital library ibiblio.org and one of the competition’s judges.

I did get the final say in the final paragraph (above) of the National Journal article that came out today. No, I can’t read it either because it’s behind a subscribers only restriction. But Sarah did send me a copy. No, I can’t reproduce the whole article here, but hey I gave you the last paragraph.

Remember I did have more to say and it made more sense too.

The Duke Moving Image Contest got several nice mentions in Copyfight as well including a call to arms today.

Growth of Triangle Bloggers Conference!

We’ve gotten a lot of folks signed up on the wiki for the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Many more than we had planned for originally. We’ve already secured a bigger room — now a small auditorium for the conference. If you have topics you want covered or a followup lunch group topic (like a Birds of a Feather session). Go to the conference wiki.

Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
NEW LOCATION: Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Dan Gillmor will also be doing a public talk on Monday February 14, 3:30 – 5:00 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center in Carroll Hall (home of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication). If you are more interested in hearing Dan than in meeting bloggers, then this is the event for you. We will have copies of We the Media for sale and for signing at both events.

Duke Moving Image Contest – further thoughts

Just took an email query from Sarah Stirland of the National Journal about Duke Law‘s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Moving Image Contest. Sarah asked what struck me in particular about the winners.

I said:

One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future. That is the future effects of the current laws or to an imagined future. That film was from Poland! (actually a cartoon) “Music for our Grandchildren”

More often film-makers looked back either in humor as in “Stealing Home” or as documentarians speaking about the extreme difficulty of practicing their craft. “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” Then they were speaking only of the current state of the law and how it has an impact on them as individuals.

This tells me that the story of the documentarians is real and immediate. We’ve been digitizing a lot of folkloric documentaries for our Folkstreams.net project and had to wonder if such films made in the 60s and 70s could be made again in the current legal climate. The answer as “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” tell us is not without great difficulty if at all. Will all documentarians have to become lawyers?

One other perhaps obvious note. All the winners were in black and white. But these days with digital editing and cameras it’s just as cheap to do color as to do black and white. I am still wondering what that means, but I suspect that it has to do with feeling the past is more compelling, more authentic and perhaps more free (to use images from at any rate). It could also mean an unhealthy avoidance of the future.

For my earlier post on the contest results, see http://ibiblio.org/pjones/wordpress/index.php?p=223

MLK: Day, Road, etc

Taking the day off for MLK Day celebrations, Sally was one of the folks asked to speak this morning at the pre-march rally at 9:30. It was cold, after a week over over 70 degree weather. Freezing in fact. But the spirits were high and the speeches were full of fire. Although my toes were pretty cold (note to self: wear weather appropriate shoes next year), I was mostly warm. Children hid out in the Post Office lobby til they were needed or needed to march.
The growing crowd then marched to the Baptist Church almost in Carrboro where several hours of singing and speaking awaited them.
Tucker and I had other appointments and so took a warm up cup of coffee with Carrboro Alderman Mark Chilton and AudioActivism’s Brian Russell at the new 3 Cups. Mark reminded me of John Ehle‘s book, The Free Men, (Harper & Row, 1965) about the local Civil Rights struggle and the people involved. Then we speed walked back to our car.
The march went within sight of the soon-to-be Martin Luther King Blvd. Sally worked hard on that project and has written a lot about it on her blog and on her site.

UPDATE: Sally has posted her talk and her impressions on her blog.

Phil Meyer on bloggers and on Armstrong Williams

Phil Meyer’s USAtoday article dated 1/12/05 points out that bloggers have become the watchdogs of the press.
Phil also points out, in an email message, that the Public Relations Society of America has taken a strong stand on the Armstrong Williams case. As you will recall, Williams was paid to promote No Child Left Behind by the Bush Adminstration [your tax dollars at work propagandizing you]. Phil laments that the Society of Professional Journalists has not acknowledged the case at all.

Blood, Mountains, Pi and Ghost Ship

I have read all of the four books selected or under consideration for the three local let’s-read-a-book-together programs. Not only that I’ve met three of the authors and I go a long ways back with two of them. In fact, I’ve written here about two of them and their authors. (just establishing my credentials).
My SILS collegue David Carr will be leading the discussion of Tracy Kidder‘s book about Paul Framer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” in Carrboro.
UNC is deciding between Tim Tyson‘s “Blood Done Sign My Name” and Kidder’s “Mountains” with Yann Martel‘s “Life of Pi” still in the running.
The rumor or more than a rumor is that Chapel Hill will mount a let’s-read-a-book program with Bland Simpson‘s “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering.
I wrote about Kidder and Farmer’s visit here to Chapel Hill to boost a fund raiser for Partners In Health and have several posts about Tim Tyson, my connections to him and others in his book and the national NPR story on the book.
I would have trouble ranking the books, but as far as social consequence of their discussions there is no doubt that “Blood” and “Mountains” are the more important.
“Pi” is a fine literary novel that I would recommend to anyone, but not particularly for a community book that would encourage a community to confront their local unresolved issues.
“Ghost Ship” is an interesting bit of North Carolina history retold as a nonfiction novel. Whatever social and community circumstances surround the mystery are largely unexplored. If the book were paired with David Cecelski‘s “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina,” we’d get a better understanding of the people, the history and the life of the coast of NC. I did greatly enjoy reading both books while on Ocracoke Island in sight of the lighthouse there.

[more after a break — poor UNC just defeated by Wake Forest]

The shared problem and shared project of this area is the problem of facing up to our shared histories. “Mountains” uses the tales of a single man and his struggles to bring light on the history and consequences of our relationship with our sister revolutionary democracy Haiti. Though Haiti can be avoided by exoticising it, by saying it’s over there across the water. Farmer would not allow that. His own book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, is strong and clear analysis of interactions of health, human rights and geopolitics. A discussion of “Mountains” can not avoid grappling with the questions that Framer makes it the business of his life to constantly reencounter. He wants us to know that mysterious Haiti is not a mystery but a part of our own doing across history.

Tyson’s book addresses many of the same questions as does Kidder’s book on Farmer. His book however is close to home. In fact not far from Chapel Hill. Not in the far distant past, but in the recent past. In 1970. Tyson tells the story of a murder that is not a mystery. As in Farmer, the “mystery” is our history and our collective doing and our decision to ignore and disown our deeds.

And the Winners are (of the Moving Image Contest at Duke Law)

Framed!Just my luck, I leave perfectly good warm pizza here in the Lab (thanks Kimberly) to sprint over to Duke Law for the announcement of the winners of The Center for the Study of the Public Domain‘s Moving Image Contest. Once I got there their pizza was cold.
You may recall that I was one of three judges for the contest; the others were Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown and FullFrame Documentary Festival‘s Laurie Racine.
The winners chosen by the three of us and the winner of the People’s Choice Online Voting were announced by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle.
As you can imagine, especially if you know the judges, there was a divergence of opinions, but we picked four very strong and enjoyable films. The People did a fine job too — since I agree with them that “Stealing Home” is particularly good.
“The contest asked for 2 minute movies about the ways that intellectual property affects art– specifically documentary film or music.”
Drop by and have a view.
Music for Our GrandchildrenLet me put in a plug for “Music for Our Grandchildren” which was produced in Poland. If you want to watch that one and you are not in Poland, then you might want to get your download from Duke.

RSS feeds of ibiblio and ibiblog

Fred and Patrick have added a list of sites with RSS feeds on ibiblio to the home page. It’s not complete — we started with our active webgroup — but it’s a giant step forward. I’ve been impressed about how much is going on. Next steps include ibiblio aggregators and publishing.
At the same time, Fred has created a group blog for ibiblio-staff to communicate with you. ibiblog is off to a good start with editting by Bret Dougherty, the Iron Dog himself.

Kuhn Ethics Paper Released (and Critiqued)

Martin Kuhn‘s paper on A Proposed Blogger Code of Ethics [PDF] to which several of you contributed is available via a link from the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference site at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. As part of the paper, Martin proposes a “Bloggers Code of Ethics” which is posted and critiqued there (you can contribute to that discussion too).
Like several of the posters, I don’t agree that you should secure permission before linking to an article.
Enjoy and put your ideas out there. Martin has given you a good place to start.

Telling (bad) Lawyer Jokes Leads to Arrest

Jokesters or Activists?
I rarely repost from Slashdot, but I confess that’s the way I found this story which was originally reported in NewsDay. Two older guys standing in line at the First District Court in Hempstead, NY were telling Lawyer jokes — all of which you’ve heard before (especially if you are married to a lawyer as I am).
The punch line is that they were arrested for disorderly conduct.

But others wonder if another punch was involved:

The men are founders of Americans for Legal Reform, a group of outspoken advocates who use confrontational tactics to push for greater access to courts for the public and to monitor how well courts serve the public. One tactic is driving a truck around the Huntington area emblazoned with the slogan “Stop The Lawyer Disease.”

In an update, NewsDay reports that radical lawyer and talk show host Ron Kuby will be defending the jokesters.

TriBlogCon: New Venue! Murphey Hall

The Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 has outgrown the room we had reserved in Carroll Hall. I’ve secured the newly renovated auditorium in Murphey Hall nearby known as MU116. This is the Classics Department building so it comes complete with Ashcroft-offending statues at the entrance to the room. Tasteful, classic and partically clothed. The room has comfortable seating, plenty of technology and wireless access.
So the new info is:

Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Murphy Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Wirelessness redundant!

On page 7A of today’s News and Observer, Nextel has a full page advert for their wireless service. The irony is that the area pictured in the advert is the lawn of Weaver Street Market in Carrboro. Memsy Price, a Nortel marketer, who is pictured in the advert doesn’t need Nextel to get internet access while at Weaver Street.
At least two wireless quilts cover the Weaver Street lawn. The first is completely free and open to all. It’s provided by Weaver Street as part of the Town of Carrboro’s wireless blanket.
The second comes from the UNC offices in the same building as Weaver Street Market (just upstairs). That network is restricted to UNC faculty, students and staff. But that group is a pretty significant part of the Weaver Street community.
To be fair to Nextel, they have very wide coverage in this area if their maps are an accurate guide, but the advert selling Carrboro as the reason to have their wireless plan is funny to me and a bit wrong.

No Bojangles tomorrow

UNC scored a mere 91 points to Georgia Tech’s 69 tonight. Sloppy play with lots of turnovers due to great pressure from the Yellow Jacket defense will result in a general drop in sausage consumption across North Carolina tomorrow. The Tar Heels left us 9 points shy of the sausage biscuit special.
Not expecting a Bojangles day after the Wake Forest game on Saturday. The Deacons just dispatched Maryland 81 – 66.

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