Coffee Black

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

― Albert Camus

Hardship's on the horizon for millions of Americans, who will learn in July that the landlord's leniency is fairly short-lived.

Debt is about to displace one-third of the nation's homeowners, as it did during the Great Depression, when lenders foreclosed on 1,000 homes every day.

And millions more are about to lose their over-leveraged luxuries–boats, RVs, second cars, and second homes.

It's time to "stop and smell the coffee."

Thoreau understood. 

On his 28th birthday, he built a pine cabin near Walden Pond and began to spend his days gardening, walking, writing and pondering the "mean and sneaking lives many of you live."

Awash in debt, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," he noted.

Americans are drunk on debt. 

Many are about to hit bottom. 

Thank goodness there's coffee.

Painting "Coffee Black" by Lyn Boyer

Facts Suck

Sometimes to do the right thing,
we must keep a promise we never made.

– Robert Breault

A friend objected to my latest post, "I Deserve Reparations, Too," where I argued that slaves' descendants should receive cash reparations only if wage-slaves' descendants do as well.

"Black slaves in America were promised reparations," she wrote. "Whether it's fair or not that just one group of people whose ancestors were slaves (or wage-slaves) receives reparations is subjective."

Facts suck. They're as stubborn as a mule.

My friend was right to remind me of the fact that our government promised slaves what became known to historians as "40 Acres and a Mule." It made no such pledge to wage-slaves.

At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln confiscated 400,000 acres South Carolina, Georgia and Florida farmland owned by Confederate planters, promising to distribute it to the emancipated slaves. But Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a Southerner, rescinded the deal six months after Lincoln's death and returned the land to the planters.

The promise of reparations was made–and broken–a century and a half and six generations ago.

Does it still have full force and effect?

It does.

US laws hold no arbitrary right exists to rescind a contract. A contract can only be rescinded on the grounds of fraud, duress, material mistake, insanity or habitual drunkenness.

Unless you can credibly argue Lincoln's confiscation of planters' land was illegal, by returning it to the planters, Andrew Johnson acted arbitrarily.

The deal still stands–and I can't insist it must now include wage-slaves as a party.

Crap. I was so looking forward to my first reparations check!

To my friend: Trisha, thanks, you pointed out a fact I overlooked. My argument for wage-slave reparations wasn't merely subjective, it was illogical.

Keep smiling!

I Deserve Reparations, Too

All of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors. 

― Damon Knight

The current unrest has sparked renewed talk of cash reparations to slaves' descendants.

Gallup, not surprisingly, reports that, while three of four Black Americans support cash reparations, two of three White Americans do not.

I'm one of the minority of White Americans who support cash reparations―with a proviso. It goes as follows: Should the federal government award cash reparations to slaves' descendants, it must also award them to wage-slaves' descendants.

Of course, Americans descended from immigrants who arrived on these shores after 1940―when wage-slavery ended―will object; and so will descendants of builders, bankers, farmers, merchants and industrialists.

Tough rocks.

I justify my the proviso as follows:

• Activists favoring cash reparations grant special status to slaves, as opposed to wage-slaves; but history shows that any differences between the two kinds of servitude were trivial. History in fact shows that wage-slaves suffered privations, injustices and outrages just as heinous as those inflicted on slaves.
  
  
• Cash reparations, activists say, are meant to redress slavery, not race; so in fairness they should be paid to all descendants of slaves―including wage-slaves―regardless of race.

At this point, the activist would cry, Wait, cash reparations aren't meant to redress slavery so much as present-day inequities that can be traced to trauma―400 years of it. Trauma due to slavery and trauma due to injustice (segregation, discrimination, redlining, lynching, police brutality, etc.).

If that's the activist's argument―and it is―then cash reparations aren't meant to compensate only for slavery, but for systemic racism. But if that's true, doesn't every Black American deserve cash reparations, even one, say, fresh off the boat from Cameroon? To deny that individual payments is in effect to say, "cash reparations are only for slaves' descendants; no other Blacks need apply."

Which loops us back to the simpler claim, that cash reparations are meant to redress an historical event, slavery. And I would insist we add wage-slavery.

So who were these 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century wage-slaves I mention? 

Largely my forebears, the Irish.

Irishmen, working for slave-wages, built America's infrastructure. We owe their descendants cash reparations.

It's as clear as day, as these three examples will tell you:

• From 1828 to 1850, Irishmen dug the C&O Canal, a 200-mile waterway between Washington, DC, and Cumberland, Maryland. Equipped with nothing more than shovels and picks, they spent 15 hours a day moving dirt, while mired waist-deep in cold, muddy water. Hunger, disease, maiming and death shadowed them, and employers routinely shorted their wages―or paid none at all.
  
  
• From 1850 to 1856, Irishmen laid the 700-mile Illinois Central Railroad. They dug out the roadbed, built up the ballast, put down the cross-ties, and laid, bolted and spiked the iron rails―every mile of the way―by hand. If injury or cholera didn't kill them, the same men continued for 30 more years to lay track through the adjoining states of Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado.

• From 1919 to 1927, Irishmen dug the Holland Tunnel, the one an a half-mile underwater tube connecting New York and Jersey City. Thousands of them cut rock for long hours in dark, pressurized chambers built on the bed of the Hudson River. Over 500 men got the bends and 13 perished from overwork, one of my ancestors among them.

If, as activists claim, America's wealth was built on the backs of Black slaves, its infrastructure was built on the backs of the Irish.

I rest my case―and eagerly await my first check.

Postscript: If your forebears were German, Swedish, Polish, Italian or Chinese laborers here in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, you deserve cash reparations as well. But you'll have to stand in line behind me.

Murder Most Foul

It is what it is and it’s murder most foul.

― Bob Dylan

I'm listening to Bob Dylan's new album and remembering the trauma that gripped most Boomers and their parents when JFK was assassinated.

Placed alongside successors, JFK was incomparable. Reagan, Clinton and Obama came close, but none was as influential as JFK.

JFK was young and lithesome; a wounded combat veteran and war hero; a dashing, thoughtful, cultured, funny and articulate politico; someone you could idolize.

The week after the president died, I recall, my dyed-in-the-wool Democrat father bought a life-size bust of JFK and put it on the mantel in our living room, where it sat for 30 years.

JFK not only steered us safely through near-Armageddon, but taught American men important lessons by example, such as why they should speed-read (they'll be better informed); why they should go hatless (they'll stand out from the crowd); how to look chic while sitting (sit in a rocking chair); who's the best contemporary fictional character (James Bond); and how to love your country (volunteer for pubic service).

And then there was Jackie. 

She taught American women by example, too. Jackie taught them to wear suits and pillbox hats; to decorate their homes with antiques; to learn foreign languages and attend concerts and plays; to devote themselves to their children's education and―most memorably of all―to conduct oneself with dignity and aplomb, no matter how foul the deck.

Yoda Wasn't Woke

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

― Gustave Flaubert 

While local governments assist, privileged Whites around the country are helping angry Blacks destroy and deface public sculptures.

A kid endorsing the desecration commented on my Facebook stream, "Time to write our own history."

The youth in me agrees; the codger cringes. 

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance," Camus said. "Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."

I'm noticing a lot of ignorance.

For example, in San Francisco this week, protesters toppled statues of Francis Scott Key and Ulysses Grant. 

History tells us Key held slaves; Grant did not. In fact, Grant played a part in slaves' emancipation; a bit part, anyway.

At this rate, the next statues in San Francisco to come down will be those of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cervantes, Beethoven, Tony Bennett and Harvey Milk. And, oh―lest we forget―Yoda. 

It seems Yoda wasn't woke.

On the East Coast this week, in Washington, DC, protesters toppled the statue of Albert Pike and attempted to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson (until police pepper-sprayed them).

While disquieting, these acts make sense.

Pike―although an advocate for Native American rights―was a racist Know-Nothing and unreconstructed Confederate. Jackson was a slaveholder and advocate for the expulsion of Native Americans.

And in New York City, the government announced it will remove a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, another disquieting act that makes sense.

The statue depicts Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by two guides, one Native American, the other Black. Although he advocated for Native American rights and owned no slaves―he was four the year the Emancipation Proclamation was issued―Roosevelt indeed was a racist.

As great-grandson Teddy Roosevelt IV eloquently said, “The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice."

But, sorry, I prize many "relics of another age"―even many that trigger. 

I'd no sooner topple Francis, Ulysses, Albert, Andrew or Teddy than I'd topple Lady Liberty―even though she stands for sexism, industrialism, imperialism, anthropocentrism, colonialism and capitalism.

Call me an antiquarian, but I like civilization.

Walking Pickett's Charge

You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality.

— Malcolm X

I think every American should do two things:

• Read Elie Weisel's Night and
  
  
• Walk the route of Pickett's Charge

The site of Pickett's Charge is a solemn, savage, sorrowful space. Nearly 2,000 soldiers perished there, shredded by shrapnel, pierced by Minié balls, stabbed by bayonets or brained by rifle butts; another 4,500 were wounded.

The point of it is: that slavery's perpetrators fought and lost; that history has chosen sides; and that all men are created equal, regardless of race, sex, gender identity, religion, citizenship or criminal history. Period. Done. Finito.

When you walk that green mile between Seminary and Cemetery Ridge, you enter a space where time itself stops or, as William Faulkner observed, "Yesterday today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible."

My experience of walking Pickett's Charge was one for the books.

The walk took place as the climax of a three-day guided tour of Gettysburg with historian Ed Bearss (pronounced "Barz").

It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The sky had turned ominous around noon, as banks of thunderheads and a lashing rain began to sweep from the west across our little corner of Pennsylvania.

When the Greyhound pulled up to Seminary Ridge, Bearss gave us nerdy buffs a choice: we could remain in safety on the bus, or follow him in the downpour, thunder and lightning, and cross the meadow where Pickett's Charge took place.

Only five of us followed. 

Ed Bearss

I'm a veritable chicken when it comes to lightning and feared I'd wind up a "sudden fried" chicken. But after five nights of watching him recently on Ken Burns' "The Civil War," I knew I couldn't miss my chance to walk the Confederates' famous route with Ed Bearss.

Only when you're on foot can you see, from the lay of the land, why Robert E. Lee believed his army had an opportunity to smash the Northern line—and why, in reality, Lee never had a jot of opportunity. The field looks flat and placid from afar, but in fact is rife with obstacles and traps; and the last quarter-mile is straight uphill—the worst kind of position to assault. The Confederate charge was doomed before its start. 

Midway across the field, the gloom turned suddenly to pitch-black and lighting bolts began to crash all around us. While I was wondering whether I'd put on clean underwear, Bearss kept advancing, lecturing nonstop and pointing out the sights with his swagger stick, like we were alone at night in a museum. At one moment, a waterlogged band of cavalry reenactors trotted out of the dark, stopped before us, and merrily saluted Corporal Bearss (a former Marine). 

It was surreal.

In an interview, videotaped in 1986 for his PBS documentary, Ken Burns asked Ed Bearss why anyone should care to visit a battlefield like Gettysburg.

Bearss answered, "Even if a person is a latecomer to the United States, these sights are close to them: they can feel them. Many of the lessons—particularly the crisis of our time over integration—would have been much more serious, if the Civil War had not happened. The Civil War showed the supremacy of a central government."

I wish every flag-toting cracker who's unhinged by the "13 percent's" demand to enjoy the rights afforded by the law of the land would walk the route of Pickett's Charge.

He'd learn without doubt his cause was lost.

NOTE: What better day than Juneteenth to plan your visit to Gettysburg? The park reopens next week.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020: Ed Bearss passed away at the age of 97 today. RIP.

Apples

The apple never falls far from the tree

— German proverb

Eric kills endangered animals for sport at taxpayers' expense.

Donald, Jr. raises millions for kids with cancer and pockets it.

Barron—regally named—depends on blackmail to avoid disinheritance.

These are our current president's sons.

The sons of another wealthy White House occupant, FDR, took far different paths when the nation entered World War II.

Jimmy enlisted as a captain in the Marine Corps and fought in the Pacific as a commando, earning the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. Newspapers called him the “fighting guy." He also served as a troop instructor and an intelligence officer. He served after the war in the reserves, retiring at the rank of Brigadier General.

Elliott, at first deemed 4-F, wangled a desk job in the Army Air Force, but quickly proved himself capable of flying photographic reconnaissance missions, leading the recon operations before D-Day and during the Battle of the Bulge. He flew over 300 missions during the war, was wounded twice, and received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He left service at the rank of Brigadier General.

Antique cup owned by FDR, Jr.
now in this blogger's collection

Franklin, Jr. served in ROTC at Harvard for four years before entering active duty as a Navy ensign. He participated at-sea in the North Africa campaign and the invasion of Sicily and received a Silver Star and Purple Heart. In March 1944, FDR, Jr. was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and took command of a destroyer escort in the Pacific that fought in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima campaigns. Upon his discharge from the Navy, he entered politics, serving as a US Congressman (and collecting antique porcelain).

John joined the Navy in 1941, applying for sea duty a year later. Hearing of his son’s application, FDR ordered that the request be denied. But John persevered and wound up on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, where he earned a Bronze star and a promotion to Lieutenant Commander. When he learned of his father’s death in April 1945, John chose to remain at his post, rather than going home for the funeral. After the war, John continued his service in the reserves.

Read more about FDR's sons' warfighting experiences.

"June Apple" by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board.

Fake Muse

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

— Winston Churchill

When the going gets tough, the tough post quotes.

Many folks I follow on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are forever posting these pith-packets, proving our appetites for the keenly-said are insatiable.

Ward Farnsworth, dean of the U. of Texas law school, calls quotations "little triumphs of rhetoric."

Quotations can give us solace, change our thinking, and move us to act. 

"Quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts," Churchill said.

But what if a quote is bullshit?

Can it still inspire?

The answer is: yes, it can inspire, at least, some of us. 

In a study of 280 people, behavioral scientists at the University of Regina presented subjects 10 randomly generated "pseudo-profound bullshit statements" (faux quotations attributed to Deepak Chopra, such as, "Imagination is inside exponential space time events”). They asked them to rate each statement's profundity on a scale of 1 to 10. The study concluded that, the more gullible we are—the higher the profundity score we give the fake statements—the higher our "bullshit receptivity.”

Highly gullible people, according to the study, are not only susceptible to bullshit, but are "less reflective, lower in cognitive ability, more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideas, more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine."

You need not be gullible, however, to be taken in by a fake muse. Lots of quotations are counterfeit.

Here are my own 10 randomly generated samples:

"Nuts."

When General Anthony McAuliffe was asked to surrender his command at Bastogne, he purportedly sent that one-word reply to his German counterpart; but in fact he replied, "Bullshit." Newspapers couldn't print a profanity in 1944.

"Follow the money."

Deep Throat never advised Woodward and Bernstein this way. Screenwriter William Goldman invented the quotation for "All the President's Men."

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein never said this. It comes from AA.

“I have just begun to fight.”

Eyewitnesses indeed heard John Paul Jones shouting at the British, "No quarter!" from his perch on the BonHomme Richard. But never this. A writer invented the quotation 50 years after the fight.

"Play it again, Sam."

Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) never uttered these words in the 1942 film "Casablanca." Woody Allen fabricated the line when titling his 1969 play.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day and would never have bad-mouthed the habit. The quotation comes from another psychoanalyst's footnote to a 1950 article he wrote for the journal Psychiatry.

"Let them eat cake."

Jean Jacques Rousseau, not Marie Antoinette, said this. He wrote it in his diary when the future French queen was only 13, single, and living in Austria. Rousseau attributed the line to Maria Theresa of Spain, who a century earlier had been told by her advisors the local peasants had no bread. "If they have no bread, let them eat cake," she replied. But the Jacobins laid the quote on Marie Antoinette at her trial.

“Nice guys finish last.” 

Leo Durocher was asked by a sportswriter what he thought of the 1946 New York Giants. Durocher said, “Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys who'll finish last.” The reporter omitted "who'll."

"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

Vince Lombardi liked to say, "Winning isn't a sometime thing; it's an all-the-time thing," a motto he stole from another football coach, "Red" Sanders. Reporters always tightened the statement.

"The harder he works, the luckier he gets."

Donald Trump never said this—about himself or anyone else. Sam Goldwyn said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get," paraphrasing an adage he saw in Reader's Digest.

So I hope you're inspired to question everything. In the immortal words of Buddha:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

By the way, Buddha never said that.



NOTE: Read a bit more about the faux quotations editors call "quilt quotes."

Blood Dues

Legs and arms and body and bone I pay in blood, but not my own.

― Bob Dylan

Though I'm all in, the willful ignorance of many involved in Black Lives Matter leads me to wonder, if guilt is collective, can't innocence be, as well?

Please stick with me a moment.

As the Bible made clear, the Israelites had zero tolerance for crime. 

A criminal automatically incurred blood guilt, guilt that dogged not only the perp, but for generations his family, city, and nation, until the crime was paid for in blood.

But the Israelites weren't the only crazies running about the ancient world.

Up north, the Celts believed that fairies owed blood dues to their partner, the devil; principle and interest payable in blood every seven years. 

To make good on the debt, fairies kidnapped and killed innocent babes―usually on Halloween―always careful to leave a changeling behind, so unsuspecting parents wouldn't get wise.

And the Ancient Greeks, too, believed in blood dues, blood-payments owed by the gods' children for the havoc the gods wreaked on mankind.

In Germany, at the end of World War II, psychoanalyst Carl Jung introduced the idea that every citizen shared collective guilt for the Nazis' atrocities, an idea our occupation forces exploited.

Philosopher Karl Jaspers doubled down on Jung's idea, claiming atonement was impossible without "acknowledgment of national guilt.”

So, if guilt can be blood guilt, sharable across generations, what about innocence?

Is there no such thing as blood innocence? 

And if blood dues were paid by generations past, aren't the living descendants off the hook for their crimes?

You might say, sure, that's what the whole Christianity thing is about.

But, closer to home, I wonder whether the 1.1 million Americans killed or wounded in the Civil War might have paid in blood for the sin of slavery, leaving their descendants debt free. 

My cousin, six times removed, Michael Folliard, was a New Jersey cavalryman who was captured at Buckland Mills and died from scurvy six months later as a POW in Andersonville. He was only 21.

Is Michael's sacrifice not an emolument that descends to me and my family? 

Or have the six generations separating us erased his blood-payment forever and all time?

What do you think?

Note to readers: As a rule, links embedded in my posts provide sources and facts omitted for brevity's sake.

Potboiler

Before his death in 2013, the Catholic priest Andrew Greeley wrote over 50 cheesy novels, netting him well north of $100 million.

His second best-seller in 1982 prompted Time's reviewer to skewer "Automatic Andy," who by admission wrote about 5,000 words―nearly one-tenth of a novel―every day.

"Everyone knows that a second novel is by definition worse than a first novel," the reviewer wrote.

"Since The Cardinal Sins was a cheap, tawdry, trashy, sleazy book, you can imagine how bad Andrew Greeley's new novel, Thy Brother's Wife, is. A putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler."

A potboiler, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is "an artistic work, usually of low quality, that has been created quickly just to earn money."

To "boil the pot"―write trash―is an 18th century expression that leans on the image of the starving artist who stoops to "put food on the table."

But food wasn't the only thing pot-boiled in the 18th century.

In 1792, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, George Washington's zaniest general and a hero of the American Revolution, was sent by then-President Washington to Ohio to grab land from the Algonquins.

"Mad Anthony" Wayne

Mad Anthony did so with dispatch, but also managed to die of gout in the process.

To protect his body from marauders, his officers buried Mad Anthony in his uniform under a blockhouse on Lake Erie.

Thirteen years later, his son Isaac appeared in a small cart to claim his father's bones. He wished to rebury Mad Anthony in the graveyard of the family church near Philadelphia. 

Isaac hired a digger to exhume Mad Anthony's remains. But upon opening the coffin he found his father's rather rotund corpse intact, too large to transport in the cart. So Isaac hired Dr. James Wallace. 

Doctor Wallace butchered Mad Anthony and boiled the pieces in a pot. 

Isaac had the reduction, the uniform, and the surgeon's saws buried in the original grave, then packed the bones in a wooden box and took them home for interment.

Cant

No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

― Rube Goldberg

"We need to unpack that."

Whenever I hear anyone mouth those words, I want to unpack the trunk where I keep my souvenir shillelagh, so I can pummel him.

The meiotic use of "unpack"―what the speaker really means is, "That's ridiculous"―is a prime example of cant.

Dictionaries define cant as "a stock phrase" or "the insincere use of pious words." 

The verb form means "to talk hypocritically" or "to speak in a singsong manner."

Etymologists believe cant derived from the Latin cantare, meaning “to chant.” 

In medieval cathedrals, the cantor directed the chants. That solemn duty required the cantor be ordained; but, with the Reformation, the requirement was dropped. Bach and Telemann, both Protestant laymen, were cantors.

Numerous claims notwithstanding, etymologists do not believe cant derived from Andrew Cant, a 17th century Scottish preacher known for his preposterous sermonizing. 

Cant

That rumor was started a century later by Bishop George Smalridge, who, worried about a wave of "ungentlemanly" canting in Britain's churches, wrote in The Spectator:

"'Cant' is, by some people, derived from one Andrew Cant, who, they say, was a Presbyterian minister in some illiterate part of Scotland, who by exercise and use had obtained the faculty, alias gift, of talking in the pulpit in such a dialect that it's said he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them."

You could simplify matters by saying cant means "baloney."

It's remarkable: we open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries are unknown to us.

I can imagine, a century from now, etymologists insisting the word trump derived from a forgotten 21st century US president. 

Trump

They will cite as their primary source an obscure "blog" (blogs were a quaint form of self-publishing on the archaic jumble of plastic and wire known as the "Internet").

Dictionaries then―as they do now―will define trump as "a card with the highest value in a game."

The verb form will mean "to beat someone" or "to be better, more important, or more powerful than another."

Twenty-second century dictionaries will also define trump as "one-upmanship" or "the art of outdoing a rival by claiming superiority, often insisting one is smarter, richer, and more popular."

Secondary definitions of trump will include "malignant narcissist," "white supremacist" and "TV star" (TV was the predominant form of entertainment before the invention in 2120 of the orgasmatron.)

White Like Me

So long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability.

― John Howard Griffin

As the president golfs before his Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, my social media stream is ablaze with denial by his "color blind" followers there's an "elephant in the room," white privilege.

While I was a freshman in high school, the Jesuits had us read Black Like Me, a still-new nonfiction best-seller by a Catholic novelist named John Howard Griffin.

In the book, Griffin described a six-week exploit in the Deep South during which he traveled the byways of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia disguised as an indigent black.

Though whites in the South insisted all blacks were "happy," Griffin's adventure from beginning to end proved a “personal nightmare.”

Griffin's travels were peppered with bullying and threats, venomous insults, and continual encounters with what he labeled the omnipresent "hate stare."

Over 10 million Americans read Black Like Me when it first appeared in bookstores in 1961; and millions more saw the 1964 motion picture. 

Griffin's story convinced many of them that blacks indeed were painfully, egregiously disadvantaged.

Sixty years later, blacks are still disadvantaged―though you'd never know it from the conservatives yakking on my social media stream.

From them you'd conclude all blacks are white―like me.