The June 11, 2021 issue of The Week magazine published this item: "Good week for: karma, after a boatful of Memorial Day revelers on Washington state's Moses Lake shouted slurs and gave the finger to another boat that was flying Gay Pride flags. Minutes later, the harassers' boat exploded, and they swam to the other boat to be rescued while shouting 'Help us!'"
This item would make an excellent basis for a short story or film short.
I knew about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. What I didn't know was that the same thing occurred in Canada. While skimming through the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, I came across the name Joy Nozomi Kogawa, a Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist, born in 1935, who wrote a novel called Obasan, published in 1981.
Wikipedia describes Obasan as a book that "chronicles Canada's internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War" and is told "from the perspective of a young child." Obasan, continues the Wikipedia article, "is often required reading for university English courses on Canadian Literature."
I plan to put Obasan on my Must-Read list.
This story has haunted me ever since I saw it mentioned on the front page of The West Side Spirit (June 10-16, 2021, "Eli's Final Chapter"). In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney, an African-American, was put to death by the State of South Carolina, writes Ben Krull, "accused of murdering two white girls, ages seven and 11." After what Krull calls a "slipshod one-day trial," Stinney was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair "based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence." The death sentence was carried out within three months, which did not give Stinney a chance for a retrial.
This case is the subject of a book by the late Eli Faber called The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South. Faber was a retired professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The book was published on June 25, 2021 by the University of South Carolina Press.
This is the first time I ever heard of a person so young going to the electric chair. It should come as no surprise that in a Southern state like South Carolina, the life of a black person, adult or child, had no value.
The Child in the Electric Chair deserves to be read. It also deserves to be adapted into a major motion picture, showing the cruelty, injustice, and bloodthirstiness of the Jim Crow South. This book should give advocates of the death penalty an opportunity to reconsider its use and to acknowledge the barbarism of the death penalty.
Stephen L. Carter's fascinating biography of his grandmother Eunice Hunton Carter (1899-1970), Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster (Henry Holt, 2018), mentions another fascinating figure, Hubert Delany.
I'm hoping someone will write a book or make a documentary film about Delany (1901-1990) who, writes Carter, "was the Negro lawyer who was the GOP candidate in the November 1929 special election for Harlem's seat in the House of Representatives." He lost that election due to the unscrupulous, racist antics of Tammany Hall Democrats.
A graduate of the New York University Law School, Delany went on to become an assistant U.S. Attorney specializing in white-collar crime.
His sisters were Sadie and Bessie Delany, who wrote the famous memoir, Having Our Say. His nephew is the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany.
Until a book about Hubert Delany is written, I'll have to be content with whatever information can be had about him in his sisters's memoir.
Note: The mobster referred to in the subtitle of Carter's book is Charles "Lucky" Luciano.
I sent Samuel Delany a message on Facebook stating that his uncle deserved a full-length biography. He agreed with me. I asked him if he had any information about his uncle not mentioned in the Carter book. Here is what he wrote on June 20, 2021:
"Characters based on both my dad and Uncle Hubert are the focus of much of the first short novel in 'Atlantis:Three Tales.' Certainly he was the biggest influence-for-good on my father. Probably on me, too. At least one scholar was pretty convinced he was gay.
"From another older cousin, dead a few years ago, I had confirmation of a long-term-close friendship (and possibly affair) with a famous black singer who was also his client. There's a bit of not-talked-about stuff in my report of his funeral in 'Letters from Amherst.' But I'd be curious to know more myself...
"He was the paternal uncle closest to me and my father, followed by Uncle Hap."
Once in a while a show will come on that's must-see TV. For me, it was Dallas in the 1970s and '80s; Lou Grant in the '70s, a series about reporters at a Los Angeles daily newspaper; City of Angels, a 2000 series set in an urban hospital, with a mostly African-American cast (it lasted two seasons); and Smash (2012-2013) which concerned itself with the behind-the-scenes drama of mounting a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe called Bombshell. Other shows in the must-see category are Monk, Mad Men, and the reality shows Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the original version) and Shark Tank.
Lately, it's been the weekly night time soap opera Saints & Sinners on the Bounce channel. When I began watching it last year, I thought it was a new series. Consulting the entertainment website IMDb, I learned it debuted in 2016.
Set in a Georgia town called Cypress, the mostly African-American characters are every bit as corrupt, conniving, backstabbing, adulterous, and homicidal as any characters in a white night time or daytime soap. And each week I'm glued to my TV set eager to find out what happens next.
I'm not sure if Saints & Sinners is a candidate for an NAACP Image Award. After all it does depict African-American characters unfavorably. But let's face it, black people in real life are not angels. And there are people in the black community who are corrupt, ruthless, greedy, and murderous. In other words, not nice people. It's foolish to pretend that such people don't exist among us. In fact, it's good to see a show about African-Americans that's not a clown show, that shows us as being human, warts and all, like every other ethnic group in America.
Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd by pressing his knee on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, cutting off his air supply, lived up to his surname.
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Second Edition, 2004) defines the word "chauvinism" as "prejudice against or lack of consideration for those of a different sex, class, nationality, culture, etc."
It was stated by a black police official on a radio broadcast that there are police officers across the country who side with Chauvin and believe he did the right thing. Those officers should be called Chauvinists.
Listening to a newscast on WNYC-AM, a public radio station in New York, the announcer used the word "unhoused" in referring to those lacking a place to call home. It's a reasonable substitute for "homeless." The last syllable of that word ("less") carries with it judgment, stigma, shame. It makes people feel that they are less than others.Whereas "unhoused" has a more sympathetic feeling and sound to it.
The word "homeless" conjures up images of people who wound up that way because of some character flaw, whether true or not.
The ways people lose their shelter are various and not always their fault such as a fire, illness, unemployment, or an unscrupulous landlord.
By referring to those unlucky to be without a home as "unhoused" allows them to be treated with civility, respect, humaneness, and dignity.
