The Smithian

“We didn’t hate white people…We didn’t even know any. We hated the system. That’s what we were protesting about.”

more.

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art: photo by Gordon Parks—’Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton,’ Mobile, Alabama 1956

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art: photo by Gordon Parks, Alabama 1955

[meaningful glance]

…storefront payday lenders tend to concentrate locations in low-income and communities of color…Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina had the highest number of payday stores per 10,000 residents. Outside of the Deep South, Missouri and Nevada were the only states with comparable density of payday storefronts…[the] five states [that]  charged the greatest amount of payday loan interest were California, Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Illinois…“Payday lending is…financial assault on communities of color. By preying on consumers with few resources, this predatory product takes what little they have and winds up leaving borrowers worse off than before..Far from creating opportunity, payday lending creates impoverished households and endangers local economies.”

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…the Alabama Legislature is moving to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro Boys—the nine black teenagers arrested…in 1931 and convicted by all-white juries of raping two white women. The trials were feverish displays of American racism and injustice that stirred a lynch mob…The travesty…eventually resulted in landmark Supreme Court rulings on the right to adequate counsel and prohibiting the exclusion of black people from juries. The case consumed the lives of the nine men, even after the rape accusation was recanted by one of the women and the testimony of other witnesses fell apart in a series of retrials and appeals. All but one defendant were sentenced to death, and though none was executed, all served time.

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…the first Mardi Gras celebration was held in Mobile, Alabama in 1703, 15 years before New Orleans was a city.  A 2008 documentary, The Order of Myths, chronicles the politics of the town’s Mardi Gras celebration today, which remains almost entirely segregated by race. The black and white communities throw two separate Mardi Gras celebrations…

more, plus clips, here.

…a new book…has gained acclaim for painting a more vivid picture of [Rosa Parks’] life, on top of the story of her refusing to yield that seat on that bus in Montgomery, AL.

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Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall. The alliteration of that litany made it seem obvious and inevitable, a bit of poetry just there for the taking. Just waiting to happen. But it has waited a long time. And President Obama’s use of it in his speech [today]—his grouping of those three places and moments in one grand and musical sentence—was bold and beautiful and something to hear. It spoke volumes about the progress that gay Americans have made over the four years between his first inauguration and this one, his second. It also spoke volumes about the progress that continues to elude us.

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“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

—Zora Neale Hurston. She was born on this day in 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. She died in 1960.

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art: painting by Ade Rossman.

 It is…an irony that the very states seeking secession from “big government”—like Louisiana and Alabama—have been among the top beneficiaries of that selfsame government. Put bluntly, the government would be far smaller without them, and they would seriously struggle far more without it. Indeed, were they to become independent, most would be failed states in need of a bailout. Only this time their benefactor would be not the federal government but the International Monetary Fund, of which the United States is the principal donor. Louisiana and Alabama would go the way of Greece and Spain.

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…with compelling firsthand accounts of the Birmingham Children’s March from several of the participants.

But King believed the time for waiting was over.