Subject: Re: My day
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:08:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sally Greene <sg5p@faraday.clas.virginia.edu>
To: Sarah Greene <Gilmer@dal.cleaf.com>

Momma,

I hope you get all of your e-mail tedium straightened out.  My week has
been frustrating because my PowerBook is in the shop.  Last week I got a
new battery (the original one finally wouldn't hold a charge), and then
immediately it didn't work.  Would work fine plugged in but not on
battery.  So I took it in.  Turns out the "new" battery was faulty.  But I
guess because I have the extended warranty, or for some reason I don't
understand, they won't just pop a new one in but instead they are ordering
it from Macintosh on High somewhere, which is taking days.

So I've watching all of the six-hour Eyes on the Prize PBS documentary
over the course of three days.  The narrator is Julian Bond, who teaches
history here.  I hope at least to meet and talk to him, and if I'm lucky
to get him to talk to my class.  Just finished the last episode, which was
about the Selma to Montgomery march.  A bright moment was when a young
Ralph Yarborough came on the screen to say "Shame on you, George Wallace."
Then they had a recent interview with him (probably around 1987)--I
wouldn't have recognized him with his thick gray hair--age improved him.
Is he still alive?

As to the broad sweep, there's no question that LBJ is the relative hero
out of all of the Presidents involved.  Eisenhower said, "slow down, do
this gradually" (and Thurgood Marshall, somebody's lawyer, pointed out
that the 14th amendment had been enacted 90 years earlier, which he felt
was "gradual enough").  Kennedy popularly gets more credit than he
deserves; he delegated the whole thing to his brother.  But when Johnson
proposed the Voting Rights Act and said "We shall overcome," Selma sheriff
Jim Clark just about fell off his feet and Martin Luther Kind cried.
Sure, Johnson didn't want those Mississippi delegates seated in Atlantic
City, but that was before the election.

I've been reading more about the 19th century too and now know a lot more
about the origin of Jim Crow laws and the tangled history of the 13th
through 15th amendments and how they were effectively ignored in the
South.  They just refused to "get it," as many of them still do.  Never
mind it's the federal law, you have to bring in the federal troops to make
them comply.  "Jim Crow" was the name of a pre-Civil War black minstrel
song, and it came to symbolize laws that were passed by states that flatly
contradicted the directives of the Civil War amendments and related
federal laws.

As to Joe Klein, maybe he did push it when he staked his journalistic
integrity, but I still don't see it as the same as Janet Cook.  He was
trying to live two alternative lives, one of which did not impinge on his
journalism and certainly did not involve tampering with news evidence.
Whereas writing a fiction is, well, fiction anyway, and there's a long
tradition of having an author's own persona appear to be fictional.

I'm on my way out to meet Paul and Tucker for pizza in town--but this
connection has already broken on me once, so here goes.