Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Schooled by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II on our Last Day of Democracy

I am lucky to be at the Creating Change Conference with 4,000 other LGBTQ activists. We are so inundated by workshops and speakers that there is no time to go on Facebook or turn on the news. Yesterday was the last day of the Obama era and today is the start of the abyss, but I am deep in this Conference of commitment, surrounded by other activists, and happily in the bubble of hope. Here’s how my first day went, starting at the end.

The National LGBTQ Task Force appears to hire staff from such a range of ethnicities and sexualities that they get most things right. They connect with multiple queer communities because they ARE multiple identities. They are not a rich white male leadership with a symbolic weak “outreach” – their staff seems to encompass the richness of this country and therefore to draw us all in. As they welcomed us to the conference at the 8:00pm plenary, they immersed us immediately in the kind of true diversity they represent. For example, we were treated to an amusing and enlightening explanation of how to be at a conference that is being simultaneously translated into Spanish and Sign.

A memorial presentation for both the victims of Orlando and others murdered by homophobia and transphobia looked at the unspeakable wounds of that violence, especially to the Latinx community, and at the ways in which people pulled together to look after each other. I wept; everyone around me wept.

The Keynote speaker Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is a commanding figure – broad, clad in purple, with a countenance both handsome and strong. He schooled us in the real meaning of the concept of intersectionality. He spoke at length and with an unflagging passion about his Southern strategy, using the amazing successes of his alliances in North Carolina as examples. He talked about how people of color, poor people, and the LGBTQ communities share the same enemies and how we are used against each other. He has always walked the walk – convincing NAACP and many Black churches to support marriage equality during that struggle. His talk was interrupted countless times as we jumped up to clap and scream, recognizing the privilege of his insights. Just one quote: “Nothing worse than being loud and wrong. Every one of our statements must have a footnote.” I was a fan before I heard him in person and now I’m a fan forever.

Most of the day had been spent at the Aging Institute – looking at the activism of older people in the LGBTQ movement. I wrote on my evaluation form: “This is clearly one of the main attractions for the older people in the LGBTQ community who come to Creating Change. It is a day that is run with impeccable skill by the charming if masterful Serena Worthington, of SAGE. The variety of voices - mainly from among Philly's elder activists - enlivens a very long day and impresses with the range of ways in which elders are organizing to change the country. Serena manages just the right mix of small groups, interactive plenaries, riveting panels, and mixed media. Elders created and hold the history of our movement and should be more widely showcased at a time when history is being turned around and our achievements are being threatened.”

I should mention that at the Elder Institute I did my first reading of my new book Lillian in Love. I’m having a “soft launch” here and will really launch it in a couple of weeks from back home. The reading was prodigious fun and people bought over half the books I brought with me to Philadelphia. This evening I have a whole workshop to myself and to Lillian in Love, where I’ll read additional excerpts.

I’m a huge admirer of the splendid organization of this gigantic conference, but I do have one beef. Here is what I wrote on the evaluation form to the organizers. “The organizers of Creating Change do an astonishingly fine job of putting together a massive conference with many dozens of conflicting demands. However, they seem to have little understanding of the needs of the movement's elders. The Institute was held in the very furthermost, the very last room down a very long hall as distant from the elevator as possible. The nearest bathrooms seemed to be nearly a mile away, quite literally, back up that long hall, and along two more very long hallways. Many of the attendees have mobility issues and the Institute had to build in longer breaks just so people could get to the bathroom with the canes, walkers, and scooters. While aging is clearly not a priority topic, one is puzzled at the ignorance of the needs of our older activists. To add to what begins to feel like an insult, the Elder Hospitality Lounge is also the very furthermost down a hall of many Hospitality Lounges that winds around the entirety of this huge hotel. What could possibly be the thinking behind these barriers to our comfort and participation? Please place us close to the elevators in coming years.”

The 411 on Weekly Planners

So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.

Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.

I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.

I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.

I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.

Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.

One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.

Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier.  If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

I’m not generally a big fan of Phillip Roth, but I’ve gotta tell you. His novel The Plot Against America (2004) is the most prescient piece of literature I’ve read since 1984. Roth nails, absolutely nails what is going on in this country during the Trump campaign for President.

Here’s the premise. Heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President in 1940 by running on an anti-Semitic platform, promising not to get involved with WWII. He is cozy with Hitler and his crowd. There are rabbinical sell-outs, over-protective neighbors, and a young Jewish kid trying to figure it all out.

To read this book now, now! as in right now, is to be bedazzled by the parallels with the present presidential campaign. It’s also a page-turner, funny in parts, and compelling in its own right. I recommend that you get it immediately. It’s resonance with our daily reality will blow your mind.

By the way, I’ve read it as an audio-book in the car – and it worked well.

Murder Under the Bridge: a Palestine Mystery By Kate Jessica Raphael (Book Review)

Murder Under the Bridge is a compelling and unique murder mystery. Written by Kate Jessica Raphael, an American with intimate knowledge of Palestine under Israeli occupation, this novel provides a glimpse behind the Wall dividing Palestine from the rest of the world. The action begins when Rania, a Palestinian woman police detective, discovers the body of a woman stranger on the outskirts of her village. The magic is not only in the message, but in the medium as well: a detective thriller is a palatable and effective way to reveal the minutia of the lives that the Conflict distorts. The author delves into the intricacies of relationships across genders, ethnicities, nationalities, generations, and most of all, the Occupiers and the Occupied.

The richness of the book is in the details, from the taxi system in Israel and Palestine, to the checkpoints that inflict daily humiliation on the residents of the West Bank. Raphael explores the subtleties by which trust and community are solidified or dismantled. By interjecting snippets of Arabic and Hebrew (immediately translated, but a glossary is included at the back of the book), we get insight into how knowledge of these two languages, along with English, plays out in the power struggles under Occupation. For example, Rania does not let on that she understands Hebrew, giving her a slight edge in conversations with her Israeli counterparts.

Prison is an ever-present and defining fact of life in Palestine, generation after generation. One prisoner Fareed, when accepting coffee from a jailer, “tried not to hate himself for his weakness. He had grown up on the stories of his father’s interrogations.” Betrayal and manipulation compound the struggle of people, especially women, to live their lives. Raphael manages to convey all of this without, for one second, lecturing. It flows from the action and the graphic descriptions.

Kate Jessica Raphael’s political and creative life changed after she spent eighteen months between 2002 and 2005 volunteering in Palestine through the International Women's Peace Service. During the writing of this, her first novel, she augmented her closely observed impressions with, she says, “the work of Israeli feminist and labor groups … and a detailed map of the area.” Raphael’s tasks as a volunteer included documenting human rights violations and accompanying Palestinians in their daily chores, using her international status to protect them. Out of Raphael’s intimacy with the Palestinian community comes this illuminating, exciting detective thriller that opens with a Murder Under the Bridge.

Challenging the Big Academic Press Worked for Me

May I brag? I got this email from the kind and communicative Managing Editor of the only academic journal I ever published in: “The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture,” from the large publisher Taylor & Francis, which publishes scads of academic journals. He wrote:

“We've recently compiled our publication data over the past seven years and thought you might be interested in the positive results. We're happy to report that your article, "Women’s Liberation Explosion At Boston University (1969–70),"  published in our 2014, 7.1 edition remains very popular and was one of our top ten most downloaded articles from Taylor & Francis in 2014… We're very happy to see the popularity of the article, and hope you will be as well. Thanks so much for your contribution to the Journal!”

But here’s what I’m really proud of. Academic journals and book publishers offer the most appalling contracts to writers of almost all publications. The journals don’t pay. They ask you to indemnify them against any legal challenges. They demand to hold the copyright of your work. And then they put your essay behind a paywall which means that it is only read by students and faculty of the universities that pay them for access.

I was approached by one of the editors about using my piece and was pretty happy about the idea of being included in the ivory tower for once – until, that is, I saw the contract. Since a contract is something that is negotiated between two parties – despite publications telling you “this is our standard document” – I started negotiating with them (with some support from my union's brilliant contract advisers.)

I told them that I would only indemnify them up to the amount they paid me: zero. I told them they could not own the copyright unless they were buying the piece outright, which wasn’t happening. I told them that I refuse to have my (unpaid) writing, about building a revolutionary movement, no less, behind a paywall.

To their credit, they agreed to all of it, every single counter-request, and the result is that people can actually get to my essay and read it. I know that the stakes are higher for people who make their living in the academic realm, but writers be advised: If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

You may have already read my piece, but if not, feel free – literally – to click here.

Book Review: The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes

I have a bad habit. When someone recommends a book or – especially – a short story that they adore, I just click onto my expansive library site and order it. Sometimes this results in an insurmountable pile of books next to my bed. Sometimes this results in reading so many books at one time (including those I listen to in the car) that I end up finishing none of them.

Someone on Facebook mentioned a brilliant short story by Langston Hughes, a writer well-known for his poetry but whose prose I adore and admire. (I don’t read much poetry unless it’s by Verandah Porche or Charles Coe.) I had to do quite a search until I found a collection that contained that story. By the time my branch procured it from whichever other library in its network held The Ways of White Folks, I had forgotten which story I was intending to read. So I’ve read them all.

I have heard Black people say often that their survival can depend on knowing with precision the ways of white people, while keeping in mind that too often white people don’t have a clue about the sub-texts of Black lives. These stories are bulging with insights into white attitudes, into conscious (“Home”) and unconscious (“Poor Little Black Fellow”) racism. Hughes infiltrates deeply into the psyche of race during the 1920s-30s and by talking about white people, reveals something profound about the environment in which Black Americans must function. (Photo: Gordon Parks 1943)

I saw Toni Morrison, another writer I hold in high regard, speak when she was promoting her book Home. I wrote about the experience including this: “When asked how she achieves her books’ unique points of view, she said, “To take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up.” She suggested that this is a common approach of top black women writers, but not of African-American male writers, who are more likely to be wrestling with a prominent white male character.”

Langston Hughes does wrestle with white men in some of the stories in this collection. However, in several important stories, Hughes also speaks from the point of view of kindly bourgeoisie white women who take a talented young Black person under their wing with copious expectations and self-satisfaction. Check out the powerful “The Blues I’m Playing” for the interplay between the talented, independent-minded pianist Oceola Jones and her patron Mrs. Dora Ellsworth. Class, in fact, figures quite broadly in these stories, a number of which focus on characters who are musicians. The exploitation of Black women’s bodies is another strong theme as well, not the least in “Red-Headed Baby,” as painful a read as any story in this book.

Thanks to whomever it was that sent me on the search that led to this volume. I hope that I’m paying back the favor by encouraging others to read The Ways of White Folks.

Angelina Weld Grimké

I only recently heard about the writer Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She was mentioned by Kay Bourne in one of the events she and her collaborator, the photographer Craig Bailey, are doing around the Boston area about the local history of Black artists. Kay mentioned Angelina Weld Grimké at a celebration of LGBT Black theater people in honor of The Theater Offensive.

Grimké wrote with gut-wrenching intensity about lynching and racism and Black families. Her famous play Rachel (1916) was Grimké’s response to the call by the NAACP for work that would counter the racism of D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

I read her amazing short story “The Closing Door,” in the thick collection Black like us: a century of lesbian, gay and bisexual African American fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise. This story knocked me on my ass. The characters are drawn with a humanity that makes them seem present in the room, not the least Agnes, the anchor of everyone else’s feelings. When one of her brothers arrives from the South with desperate news of another brother, Agnes is catapulted into a terrifying depression. The range of perspectives inside this one home is monumental. And the ending is a weighty comment on the bittersweet complexity of motherhood within an oppressive Jim Crow environment.

Because I have not yet read much of her work, this post will necessarily be short. I write to share in the off chance that, like me, Angelina Weld Grimké is missing from your shelves. Work of such power and import may be something you want to experience.

Book Review: Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity

Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, ed: Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis, (Lawrence & Wishart, 2014) includes essays by 19 members of Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF), a remarkable secular, feminist organization in the UK. WAF was born out of the desire of women from the Islamic community to oppose the fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie. WAF rapidly attracted progressive feminists of every background and many nationalities - from Irish Catholic to Israeli Jewish to Punjabi Sikh to English Sunni Muslim. WAF shook up the British discussion of anti-racism when it challenged the misguided liberal "multi-cultural" approach, which assumes that the religious leaders of any particular community represent everyone in that community. WAF also broadened the feminist critique of Islamic fundamentalism by insisting that all forms of religious fundamentalism share an agenda aimed at controlling women and seeking political power.

Full disclosure: I was a member of WAF when living in London during the 1990s. I know several of the 19 women who, by writing in this book’s essays with candor about their lives and about their personal political development, illuminate the unique political contributions of WAF.

Pragna Patel (at left) opens the book with her chapter “Flying by the Nets of Racism: Patriarchy and Religion.” As a founder of Women Against Fundamentalism, her insightful overview of WAF serves as the perfect set-up for the rest of the essays. Born in Kenya in 1960 to Gujarat, Indian parents who were part of the influx of railroad workers to Kenya, she found herself at London’s Heathrow in a sleeveless cotton dress and flip-flops in December, 1965. As the eldest sister, she had to fight her way out of some constricting traditions, not the least forced marriage to a stranger. She was aided, she explains, by James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in particular this line: “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

Patel explains some of the complex concepts that distinguished WAF’s politics from those of other feminist and anti-racist groupings. WAF developed a politics and practice of solidarity across communities. This stood in contrast to identity politics. In WAF, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and other women criticized the power structures inside communities while fighting racism outsiders aimed against those communities. The prevailing British “liberal” concept of multiculturalism erased gender and class differences by imagining each of these communities as homogeneous. Because much of the liberal “celebration of difference” was built around religious holidays, multiculturalism also sidelined secular members of those communities.

Patel ends her chapter with an examination of the difficulties in keeping WAF alive, not the least that most members had a primary political commitment outside of WAF and that Britain’s anti-racism actions were becoming increasingly dominated by fundamentalist groups, making the framing of WAF’s protests tricky.

Clara Connelly (at left) talks about the “twin influences of Catholic and nationalist ideologies on a woman growing up in southern Ireland in the middle of the last century,” in her piece “Confessional of an Anti-Clerical Feminist.” Despite many disagreements, some of them intense, she points to WAF’s precious contribution to the world of feminist thought. “…WAF filled a unique place in British feminism whose influence stretched beyond our numbers and our national borders.”

Julia Bard, whose activism in the Jewish Socialist Group overlapped with her membership in WAF, appreciated being with “people who were dissident within their communities in such a progressive way… People in the group were very courageous about challenging the Catholic Church, for example, or the Sikh or Hindu leadership, in situations where dissent was dangerous.” She herself was accused of anti-Semitism when she questioned the ancient custom of circumcision in her Jewish community. “There was a very strong sense of mutual support among the women. We did have some quite profound disagreements, and I think there were fault lines that we never managed to bridge.”

In “Made in Little India,’” Sukhwant Dhaliwal (at left), one of this book’s editors, feels that her family experienced its individual version of “the classic Punjabi immigrant to Southall story.” As the only daughter, “cultural reproduction seemed … to flow only through me” – from traditional clothing to religious education. She was lucky to have two brothers who supported her struggle to remain in the heart of her community without suffering the scary restrictions that hovered over her, such as arranged marriage. To avoid that fate, she made sure to get into a college and to stay on campus. That delicious taste of freedom led to her life of activism and intellectual achievement.  

Sue O’Sullivan’s (at left) chapter is entitled “Change, Chance, and Contradictions.” She joined WAF during its relatively short period of reinvigoration following a hiatus. Despite many decades of political activism around socialism, feminism, HIV, and anti-war work, she found it hard as a newbie to locate herself within the organization. She had long admired the sophistication of WAF’s analysis and the energy of its actions, but once involved with the group she experienced a crisis of confidence that was common to many newcomers: “I was anxious about saying the wrong thing.” Years after the end of WAF, however, she happily finds “WAF women as organizers and participants” in many of the struggles and political groups she is now working with.

Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity provides an instructive sense of the WAF organization itself, by highlighting the process of political maturation through the essays of these 19 individuals. This important, compelling book delivers a taste of the unique experience of working with a truly international, profoundly cross-cultural group of committed feminists who, despite the end of this supportive organization, continue today to wrestle with the most troubling oppressions in Britain and abroad.

I’m So Over UMass Boston

Let me start by saying that I don't usually accost cops. Let me add that I’m a big believer in state public universities and I know that UMass Boston is highly respected. Some of my best friends studied or taught there.

I had my first and last visit yesterday, to read from Lillian’s Last Affair, and to lead a discussion on aging and sexuality at an event sponsored by the Osher Life Long Learning Institute. The class of about 50 older people was lovely; the session went very well; I sold about a dozen books. I forgot to take a photo.

But getting to and from the class was too nasty to bear.

I was told to park in the distant Bayside lot and take the frequent shuttle bus to Campus Central. My GPS led me right into the crowded lot where a guy in a fluorescent vest signaled me to go to the next section. There a guy in a fluorescent vest signaled me to go to the next section. This went on until I was at the end of the world. I had asked the second guy where the shuttle bus stopped and he told me there was only the one bus-stop – at the entrance to the lot. I had asked the third guy as well and got the same reply.

It was raining and blowing hard. I was wearing a porkpie hat and a silk jacket. I had a small wheelie full of books and a large bag with my other presentation materials. I unloaded and fought the rain and wind, holding an umbrella, and hiked over uneven gravelly terrain with a complaining four-wheel suitcase and got to the shuttle, maybe 3/4 of a mile or more.

At Campus Central I de-barked the shuttle quite far from the front door and made an awkward dash for the entrance as the weather was worsening. Inside the building I walked the equivalent of a few blocks to the elevators that took me to the second floor where I walked a few more confusing blocks through what they call The Maze and over a catwalk into the next building where I eventually found another bank of elevators. Here I took the elevator to the third floor where I walked more halls to room 207A – yes, 207A is on the third floor. Go figure.

All went well at my reading and I packed up and went to retrace my steps. I stopped by the office to thank the woman who had pulled together the event, but she was at a meeting. I returned the whole torturous way to the lobby of Campus Central only to realize that the woman had never given me the promised parking pass. Otherwise I’d have to pay.

By this point I’m weighing whether or not it is worth returning once again and I decide to do it. At the office I wait a long time as no one seems to know where the passes are – despite the fact that I had reminded them on my arrival.

Okay, I return the whole route back to Campus Central only to find that the rain has turned into a monsoon, with impossible winds (too much for an umbrella) and drenching rains. I beg a plastic bag for my hat, take off my silk jacket and stuff it in the suitcase, and then put the carry bag on my shoulder under my over-jacket (made out of absorbent cotton). I’m dripping just in the time it takes to rush to the shuttle bus. When we are dumped at the entrance to the parking lot, I realize that the hike to my car will cost me the 15 books I am carrying – they don’t fancy a shower.

I see a suspicious SUV about a block away and rush over. Yes, it is a campus police car. I pound on the passenger window. The cop doesn’t know what to do. I pound some more. He lowers the window an inch. “Open the doors!” I scream. He lowers the window another inch. “Open the doors. I can’t make it!”

He unlocks the doors. I open the back door and toss my suitcase onto the seat and jump into the passenger seat in the front. “I’m parked at the very end of the far lot and I simply cannot make it on my own. You need to drive me there.”

“I’ve never done that,” he says.

“Always a first time,” I insist, gasping and dripping and swearing under my breath.

He drives me while I blather about the lack of accessibility for people with disabilities, older people, exhausted people, people schlepping precious books in a downpour.

UMass, if you only want young, healthy people to darken your doorstep, then continue in your inconsiderate ways. If you want the whole community, add three or four shuttle stops inside the parking lot – a very simple, inexpensive solution for what is now an appalling situation. Until you do, hello and goodbye. We’re through.

My Introduction to August Wilson’s Extraordinary Play “Fences”

Better late than never. I knew next to nothing about August Wilson until he died in 2005. The upside of that deficit is that now I can catch up on all his amazing work. I should’ve known about Wilson because he was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1945 and I was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1947. A hill of housing Projects for poor people, in later decades it became known as the “worst” part of town, and at one point, a “no-go zone”—meaning, I believe, that the police were afraid to enter the neighborhood. Back in our day, when there was a sense of community, the population was a mix of African-Americans, many of them – like Wilson’s mother – having come up from the South, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. I only lived in the Hill District my first three years, and then we moved out in 1951, I believe.

August Wilson was there a bit longer. But in the 1950s when his family moved out to a white working class neighborhood not far from where we were living by then, they were the target of a lot of racist shit. He had a hard time finding a school and ended up for a while at Connelley Vocational High School, where my dad studied to be an electrician one or two years before getting an electricity shock that put him in the hospital and ended his education. August Wilson too left school around age 15, but he more or less educated himself at the Carnegie Library – the place that saved my life as well, and in fact that library ended up giving him the only college degree they ever awarded.

He produced a series of 10 plays that portrayed black life in Pittsburgh in succeeding decades called The Pittsburgh Cycle – all but one take place in the Hill District. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for them. In fact, seems like he won every damn prize available to playwrights in his too-short life.

I got “Fences” out of the library (one of the ones that won him a Pulitzer). And read it last night. It is compelling, deep, honest, and beautiful. It wrestles, with wit and with candor, with the difficulties of living in that flawed institution known as the family, which itself is embedded in a racist society that refutes your claim to a decent life. Sons are pitted against fathers, and wives against husbands. “Fences” faces the complexities of extended families – and all nuclear families are just one betrayal or disability or disaster away from being extended.

I warn you now that I’m about to have an August Wilson orgy – I’m going back to my library to order as many of the Pittsburgh cycle as are available. I highly recommend that if you haven’t read “Fences,” take an hour or two and enrich your life.

I haven’t touched on the adult part of August Wilson’s life, because I don’t know much about it. I thank Kay Bourne, my go-to historian, for turning me on to August Wilson and to so many other talented, accomplished African-Americans.

I end with two quotes about writing from August Wilson:

“I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.”
  

“Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.”

And here is an excerpt from the 2010 Broadway revival of FENCES, starring Denzel Washington (as Troy Maxson) and Viola Davis (as Rose):