Wading Into It

I think you have George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington mixed up. As I remember it, George Washington Carver was a botanist who specialized in peanuts. Booker T. Washington was the guy mentioned in the book. I remember him as being some kind of Black leader, but this book makes him out to be an Uncle Tom. I have head of Tocqueville, but I have never read any of his stuff. He was a French guy who wrote a book about democracy in America, and right wing nuts still like to quote him out of context. I thought that W.E.B. Dubois was some kind of Communist, and maybe he was, but the book doesn't mention that. I didn't even know he was Black until now. I have never heard of this Myrdal character before, but he sounds like a  nice guy, if a bit idealistic. The book seems to say that all these guys contributed to the past and current attitudes about race relations, but I'm not so sure about that. It has been my experience that most people get their ideas from their friends and family, not from experts like these.

I found the introduction and Chapter 1 to be a tough read. I wouldn't say it was boring, exactly, but I found myself reading the same sentence over and over again and not getting it. Then I just went ahead and read it without worrying about it, and I think I got it in by the end, well as much as I need to anyway. I am almost finished with Chapter 2, and I find it to be way more interesting, or maybe I'm just getting used to the writing style of the book. I was like that with "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". It was written in 18th Century England, and people talked a little funny in those days. The dialect is not as strange as Shakespeare or the King James Bible, but it takes some getting used to. I won't spoil it for you but, suffice it to say, Richard J. Daley did not invent crooked politics in Chicago.

Apparently, Martin Luther King did not invent racial conflict either. That stuff seems to have been around since forever, and the events that happened in our lifetime were just another chapter in the continuing saga. Reading about it and seeing it on TV back in the 50s, I got the impression that it was exclusively a Southern problem, and I didn't understand what the fuss was all about in Northern cities like Chicago. I think I first got an inkling of it when I looked up that stuff for you about Detroit, and this book promises to expand upon that base.

I had a teacher in Gage Park who said, whenever you see a book with more than one author, the last one listed is usually the one who did all the work. I don't know if that's true or if that teacher was just being a smart aleck. I think it was my sister who told me that it's common for post graduate students to have their work plagiarized by their professors. Of course we don't know if that's what happened here. I remember Rev. Al as being a really nice guy, and I would be surprised to find out that he took advantage of somebody like that, even after all these years.