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Flowers for the Trashman
—for
Grace Claiborne Johnson
By Rudolph Lewis
At 91
she’s a Jet achiever—
her
fourth graduate degree from VSU—
novelist, artist, dancer, a teacher—
a
published poet—a Renaissance woman.
I
found the artifacts of her long life
at a
dumpster—two framed certificates
of
“appreciation”; a framed clipping
from a
Petersburg paper; framed artwork.
How
came this poet to this ugliness, I
wondered? A "white man" & his wife pulled down
her
skeletal life from a bought trailer.
By
frames, they set her up against a wall
thinking some soul might find a home for her.
I’ll shed no tears: all beauty
comes to dust.
13 March 2007
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Woman at 91 receives master's degree
Education - Grace Claiborne Johnson-Goodwyn,
historian
Grace Claiborne Johnson-Goodwyn,
91, recently received her master of arts degree in
history from Virginia State University (VSU). This is Johnson-Goodwyn's
fourth graduate degree. "I love it," said Johnson-Goodwyn,
a former elementary school reading teacher. "Next
year I'd like to go for another. One of the teachers
said, `Grace, go over there to Richmond and take
law.' I would do it if it wasn't for the driving." Johnson-Goodwyn's journey began
when she graduated from VSU with her bachelor's
degree in 1946. Since she retired from teaching, she
has written a book of poetry and two novels and a
fourth book is in the works. She said she decided to
be a historian, so she returned to VSU in 1997 to
further her education.
Virginia Governor Mark R.
Warner spoke at the graduation and characterized
Johnson-Goodwyn, a Petersburg native, as a true hero
for her educational persistence. "She gives a whole
new meaning to the phrase lifelong learning," said
Warner, who was honored by VSU with an honorary
doctor of law degree. Joseph Goldenberg, chairman of
VSU's history department said, "She's been very
persistent. We have a foreign language requirement,
and she got through two years of Spanish. It's not
easy to learn a foreign language at that age." Goldenberg said the sight of
Johnson-Goodwyn slowly making her way to the
classroom with the aid of a cane inspired classmates
who were 70 years younger.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Johnson
Publishing Co.
Source:
Jet, May
27, 2002
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Local lady named model for others
By Kim
Coghill
Petersburg — In many cases the
intangible selfless gifts offered by “saints’ go
unnoticed and unrewarded. But thanks to area residents,
one local woman who has spent a lifetime giving back
to the children and adults of her community, will
receive special recognition. Norma Jean Blalock, of WTVR
Channel 6 said “from what I’ve read about Grace
Claiborne Johnson—she sounds like a wonderful lady.” And Johnson is just that.
The lifelong Petersburg
resident is known as a writer, author, teacher,
musician, poet, artist, storyteller—and, of course,
a mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Friday at 6 p.m., Johnson will
be spotlighted as one of eight Central Virginians
selected by Channel 6 and Consolidated Bank as this
year’s “Excellence in Community, African-American
Role Model.” Blalock said hundreds of names
were nominated, yet only eight are named winners by
the selection committee.
As part of her recognition, a
news article featuring Johnson will appear in “For
Kid’s Sake” magazine, and her story, along with the
other winners, will once again run Saturday, March
4. Anyone who have lived in the
Petersburg area during the years has probably at
some time come in contact with Johnson. As a small child of 12, Johnson
was the beautician of Delectable Heights, as well as
the teacher.
“My mother taught me to read
when I was 4,” she said. “By the time I was 12, I
was teaching adults in the neighborhood to read.” Additionally, as a child
Johnson’s mother insisted that she take a
cosmetology class because, “eventually you may need
it.” Those lessons led Johnson into
cutting hair and later sewing dresses.
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“I was always a momma’s girl,”
she said. “While everyone else was out with their
boyfriends, I was at home with my momma reading and
writing, cooking and sewing.” Johnson, the mother of two,
grandmother of 10 and great-grandmother of seven.,
is a retired Surry County educator who holds a
master’s degree in early childhood education.
She assisted in implementing
Surry County’s remedial reading program and was also
part of the drama and speech department. Closer to home, Johnson opened
one of the city’s first daycare centers in
Delectable Heights. Johnson is the brains behind
the Petersburg Girl’s Choir and the Royale Festival
Theater of Petersburg.
In her spare time, Johnson has
published several books including one of poetry,
Sitting in the Window Looking Out, a historical
novel “Great and Honorable Departure,” and “Sootie
Lu,” a novel of ugliness turned to beauty and an
additional novel centeres around harassment. In February, during Black
history Month, Johnson is slated to speak at
Powhatan’s Beaumont Correctional Facility “to the
men,” she said. The Petersburg resident is also
a member of St. Stephens Episcopal and participates
in radio talk shows at Virginia State University.
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Source: The
Petersburg Monitor February 1, 1995
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Grace Claiborne Johnson-Goodwyn Awards
Certificate of Appreciation
for outstanding service and contributions to The
Black History Celebration—The Black Family. February
25, 1995. Olive Branch Baptist Church, Dinwiddie,
Virginia. Rev. Alfred L. Thompson.
Certificate of Appreciation—A
true African-American Artist, who has distinguished
herself in the area of dance, drama, music, and
creative writing. A stalwart supporter of her
community, Petersburg, Virginia, she is Founder of
the Petersburg Girls Choir, The Royal Festival
Theatre, and many other groups. February, 1995.
National Association of African-American Studies.
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Response
Uncrowned Queen at the Trash Dump—We
decided to honor Grace Claiborne Johnson-Goodwyn as
the first Uncrowned Queen who actually got rescued
at the trash dump. She was truly a “flower for the
trashman.” We would love to have more information on
Ms. Johnson-Goodwyn so that we can tell her story in
greater detail. Please contact us at
uncrownedqueens@buffalo.com or
bertram@buffalo.edu
—Peggy
Brooks-Bertram
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Note from
the author: The poem above is a double
remembrance, not only for Ms. Johnson, but also for
Marvin X's play Flowers for the Trashman,
anthologized in
Black Fire: An
Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by
Amiri Baraka and
Larry Neal. The "Trashman" in
the play is a florist (father of two sons, both in
prison) and he is called a "trashman" by his
incarcerated son because he talks "trash." At the
end of the play the father dies of a heartache on
the way to bail his younger son out of prison.
posted 13 March
2007
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Civilization: The West and the Rest
By Niall Ferguson
The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the "killer applications" that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic.
Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." Based on the author's
dissertation, the book is free of
academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly |
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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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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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
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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