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Go
South to Sorrow
By Carl T. Rowan
Reviewed by John J. O'Connor
Carl Rowan is a
prize-winning journalist on the staff of the Minneapolis
Tribune. He returned to his native South to find out what
had happened since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on racial
integration in the nation's public schools.
He discovered
that the NAACP was trying to advance the emancipation of Negroes
by law suits whereas the KKK and the White Citizens Councils
were equally determined to preserve white supremacy.
Communication had largely broken down between representatives of
the two races.
The South was
caught in a web of fear, lawlessness, confusion and insecurity.
Demagogues worked overtime to convince worried people that those
who spoke out for an end to racial segregation in America were
engaged in a Communist scheme to destroy "the Anglo-Saxon
race."
Mr. Rowan
reviews the Till case, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the
Autherine Lucy incident on the campus of the University of
Alabama. He fires several solid broadsides at Senator Eastland.
But the men who really disturb him are the so-called
"moderates," those who favor what Mr. Rowan regards as
a gutless do-nothingness. Defiant men today have the initiative
and Mr. Rowan believes that they will continue in defiance until
the authorities responsible for law and order take back the
initiative.
Mr. Rowan is in
error if he believes that moderation necessarily means
do-nothingness. He fails either to recognize or to give credit
to the persevering efforts of many religiously motivated people
and institutions. In many quiet but effective ways they are
preparing the way for a new era in race relations.
Any delay, of
course, has tragic consequences for the present generation of
Negroes who are being shamefully deprived of their human rights.
But any all-out frontal attack on segregation today would have
even worse consequences.
Source: Books
on Trial (June-July, 1957)
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Carl
Rowan
(August
11, 1925 -- September 23, 2001)
Chronology |
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1925 (11 August) -- Born in Ravencroft, Tennessee, a dying coal mining
town.
1942 -- Graduated from Bernard High as valedictorian and
president of a class of 13 students. enrolled at Tennessee
A&I, now Tennessee State University.
1943
-- Navy sends Rowan to Northwestern University for summer
training as a naval reserve officer. When the university refused
him residence because of his color, the navy transferred him to
Oberlin.
1944
-- Passed a competitive exam to become one of the
first Blacks in Naval officer training.
1947
-- Graduated from Oberlin, a mathematics major
1948 -- Earned a master's degree in
journalism from the University of Minnesota and joined the
Minneapolis Tribune as a copywriter (until 1950).
1950-1961
-- Staff writer for Minneapolis Tribune, ), reporting extensively on
civil rights movement.
1953
-- South of Freedom published.
1956 -- The Pitiful and the Proud published.
1957 -- Go South to Sorrow published.
1960 -- Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of
Jackie Robinson published.
1961 -- Joined Kennedy administration. working as deputy
assistant secretary of state for public affairs.
1963-1964
-- Served as U.S. ambassador to Finland.
1964-1965
-- Director of the United States Information Agency.
1967-1996
-- Appeared as panelist on public affairs television
show Inside Washington.
1974
-- Just
Between Us Blacks published.
1987 -- Founded Project Excellence, which has
awarded over $39.5 million in scholarships to college-bound
black students from the Washington, D.C., area, many of whom
have gone on to graduate from Oberlin College.
1991 -- Breaking Barriers: A Memoir published.
1993
-- Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice
Thurgood Marshall
1997 -- Awarded Alumni Medal by Oberlin College Alumni
Association commencement weekend.
2000 (23 September) -- Died this morning of natural
causes in the Intensive Care Unit of Washington Hospital Center.
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected
Poems
By
Robert Hass
The Apple Trees at Olema includes
work from Robert Hass's first five books—Field
Guide,
Praise,
Human Wishes,
Sun Under Wood, and
Time and Materials—as well as a
substantial gathering of new poems,
including a suite of elegies, a series of
poems in the form of notebook musings on the
nature of storytelling, a suite of summer
lyrics, and two experiments in pure
narrative that meditate on personal
relations in a violent world and read like
small, luminous novellas. From the
beginning, his poems have seemed entirely
his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line,
with an unwavering fidelity to human and
nonhuman nature, and formal variety and
surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking
through difficult things in ways that are
both perfectly ordinary and really unusual.
Over the years, he has added to these
qualities a range and a formal restlessness
that seem to come from a skeptical turn of
mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the
poem and of the complexity of the world of
lived experience that a poem tries to
apprehend. Hass's work is grounded in the
beauty of the physical world. His familiar
landscapes—San Francisco, the northern
California coast, the Sierra high
country—are vividly alive in his work. His
themes include art, the natural world,
desire, family life, the life between
lovers, the violence of history, and the
power and inherent limitations of language.
He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully
as he can, what it is like to be alive in
his place and time. |
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 14 December 2011
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