Many American Dreams Deferred

"Young men and women roamed the desolate blocks--slowly going nowhere. Others hung out on corners with the trash swirling about their feet--hungry, jobless, and sullen with defeat. Harlem, a prison of crumbling squares, seemed to be sinking into itself. Its inhabitants were a long way from the promise of the American dream."--Gordon Parks, photographer/film director/author, from his book, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 1979), Page 180.

The young people Gordon Parks witnessed in Harlem were among the many whose American dreams, if they had any, were deferred.

Norman Mailer's Thoughts On State Violence

"[T]here are two kinds of violence: individual violence and the violence of the state. The violence of the state is not just wars, it's also concentration camps...There can be violence in total censorship. Anything that cuts off expectations from people, possibilities from people, anything that compresses people by external government force is the violence of the state....Individual violence is very often the natural answer of people to the collective violence of the state." --Norman Mailer, from Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (Empire Books, 1982), Page 36.

Watch Out For Miss Alice

Whenever my friend and upstairs neighbor Scotty Crawford (now deceased) referred to the police as "Miss Alice," I thought it was a humorous name he had made up. I learned later from a book about the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York's Greenwich Village that gay men back then called cops "Alice Blue Gown."