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Books by Marcus Bruce
Christian
Song of the Black Valiants: Marching Tempo
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High Ground: A Collection of Poems /
Negro soldiers in the Battle of New Orleans
I am New
Orleans: A Poem
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Negro Iron Workers of Louisiana: 1718-1900 /
The Liberty Monument
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DN17
A
Jim Crow Bus
& the Weight of Tradition
March
20, 1945
A
young white man of about 28 boarded a Gentilly Bus No. 1558 on
the morning of March 20, 1946; he was dressed in khaki dungarees
and a loose hanging sweater. He wore no hat or cap and his dark
brown hair had been tangled a bit by the spring winds. His
complexion was slightly dark, but there was no doubt that he was
white. He did not stop when his companion stopped in the aisle
in the white section of the bus, but made his way parallel to
the rear side door and there stood in a hip-shortened
resting position with his hands on the back of a seat in which
sat a single occupant--a young Negro girl in her teens.
Two
Negro screen-pushers, a single Negro in a second seat, an empty
seat -- all cross-seats -- made up the ensemble. There
were also other empty seats in the colored section here and
there. The Negroes -- who had been crowded and standing in the
white section ten blocks before -- were now in possession of
most of the empty seats.
The
white man, seeing that the Negroes made no move to relinquish
their seats and take ones further back in the bus,
suddenly became imbued with a very brilliant idea, and smilingly
took the screen from the right side of the bus--where the Negro
girl was sitting--and placed it on the back of the empty seat
behind the Negroes and still smiling, sat down behind them.
To heighten the humor of the situation, he had turned the
wording on the seat "For Colored Patrons Only" towards
the front of the vehicle. The Negro men were thus sandwiched in
with him between two signs which read similarly. To move either
way would be to disregard the captions on the signs before and
after them. This arrangement left the little Negro girl on the
right and all of the Negroes on the side of the bus without any
signs of segregation, and the white man had thus by his actions
"emancipated" them to the status of the whites.
A
white woman, boarding the bus sometimes after this had taken
place, looked at the muddled situation and unable to arrive at
any reasonable conclusion, decided that it was best to stand. At
last reports the white man was still sitting behind the two Negro
men, the three of them shut off from the rest of the passengers
by the screens in the front and back. The Negro passengers in
the rear, seeing the ludicrous situation, had begun to nudge
each other. Ill-concealed chuckles went down the aisle like an
irresistible snowball. The bus driver, sitting in the front,
collecting fares and discharging passengers, was oblivious to all that had taken place.
<<---Previous
Next---18->> * *
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Selected Letters
Selected Diary Notes Memories of Marcus B. Christian
(Cains) Christian's
BioBibliographical Record Introduction to I AM NEW
ORLEANS
A
Theory of a Black Aesthetic Magpies,
Goddesses, & Black Male Identity
Activist Works on Next Level of Change
Intro to I Am New
Orleans
Letter from Dillard University
A
Labor of Genuine Love
Letter of Gift of
Photos
Letters from
LSU and Skip Gates * * *
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Negro Iron Workers of Louisiana: 1718-1900
By Marcus Bruce
Christian
Study of the blacksmith
tradition and New Orleans famous lace
balconies and fences.
Acclaimed during his life as the unofficial
poet laureate of the New Orleans
African-American community, Marcus Christian
recorded a distinguished career as
historian, journalist, and literary scholar.
He was a contributor to Pelican's
Gumbo Ya Ya, and also wrote many
articles that appeared in numerous
newspapers, journals, and general-interest
publications. |
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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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