I listened to Go Up for Glory. The past tense is inaccurate. I listen to the books repeatedly.
My sister introduced me to the format. Literacy is overrated. For decades I have had a low opinion of audiobooks. Not anymore.
I like audiobooks because I can listen to them while I drive. The visual is less concrete.
Hearing Go Up for Glory, I realised, feared a bit, that we are in the post racial era. Mr. Russell's problems were my problems. Me in the mid-twentieth century wouldn't have said that.
I attended a service at a church. I am trying to remember a day when I was more proud of my grandparents. In a video on the church's website, a black Catholic St. Augustinian appears to miss the days of segregation. There is value in family. There is beauty in asymmetry.
Nothing made a greater impression on me than an incident involving my Grandpa Jake, a sharecropper in Louisiana. After a harvest, Jake told his landlord that he would not farm the area again. “Nigger, don’t tell me what you ain’t gonna do,” the farmer warned. After a scuffle, the white man left, threatening to be back with the Ku Klux Klan. Jake took his family, including my father, Charlie, to a neighbor, then returned and sat on his front porch with a shotgun. Several cars pulled up that night and began to empty just before Jake fired his shotgun into the darkness. The men piled back into their cars and drove away. Jake never heard from the white farmer again.
The next time a white suburbanite starts lecturing you on gun control, please remind them of Mr. Russell's grandfather's experience.
Once we went to the ice house and the attendant just let us sit in the car for fifteen or twenty minutes while he talked to another white man. That man drove off and another car came along and the attendant went to wait on those people, so my father began driving off. The attendant ran over to my Dad’s window and said: “Don’t you ever try to do that, boy. Unless you want to get shot.” He had a big gun. My dad picked up a tire iron and got out of the car and the red-neck just turned and ran for his life and my heart overflowed with wonder and pride for my father. It does to this moment when I look back to what he was facing.
Mr. Russell,
My heart overflows with pride when I think of your father's courage.
Lyndon Baines Johnson could not have done what he did without the Federal government's intrusions in the South. My greatest concern regarding rolling back Federal power to that of the Founder's ideals is that we will return to the sort of racial abuse that existed at that time.
I was recently speaking with a Black Republican, a woman. She asked me if I had such concerns. I admitted I do. Nonetheless, people have to step up. They must learn to control their own destinies. Israel also must learn to grow up.
