In responding to the summary dismissal of LeGarrette Blount from the University of Oregon football team for punching a Boise State player, an acquaintance marvelled at the disproportionate influence the camera had over the judgment of officials on the field.  In identifying “the camera” as the prevailing arbiter of right and wrong in that incident, it inspired me to look closer at the technology that spawned its seeming omnipresence in our lives.

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Again, this year I was asked by the Black Students Association to offer remarks at its
annual President's Welcome Reception at which President Drew Faust offered a special greeting this past Monday.  The following are my reflections on what I said:

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Senator Edward M. Kennedy was a person of great wealth and influence,
but much of his political energy was expended fighting for those
farthest removed from his "Camelot."

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In the spring of 1974 Adele Smith Simmons, Dean of Student Affairs at Princeton, offered me the position of Assistant Dean of Student Affairs.  Two of my supporters were Bill Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, the respective President and Provost of the University.  They were very encouraging and gracious before and after the job offer, but I chose to remain at Harvard as an assistant director of admissions and a proctor in Harvard Yard for personal reasons.

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In my travels around the country, a phenomenon that never fails to impress me is the athletic excellence maintained by some of the most challenged schools in some of the most difficult urban areas.  I immediately remember the varsity football team at East St. Louis Senior High School when Bob Shannon coached it to SIX Illinois state championships at the highest level of competition.  I need not describe the innumerable problems that beset East St. Louis, Illinois.

The following is a reaction to what I have observed over the years:

Athletic Coaches Are Successful Teachers
(Let’s Use Them in the Classroom)

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The following Southern cities played dark historic roles in the civil rights movement and
all received national and international media coverage.  Most Americans of a certain age or awareness are familiar with them, but what ISN’T widely known is that today ALL of them are led by African American mayors!

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After speaking to some African American members of the Harvard Class of 2009 and their parents the evening before graduation (6/3/09), several of them (parents and students) asked for my words-of-rhyme about "shakers" and "pickers" with which I ended my remarks.  I'm no Langston Hughes, but here is that rhyme:

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East of Stan Kenton, but west of Duke Ellington; south of Glenn Miller, but north of Jelly Roll Morton, in the 1930s, there was a red hot Kansas City swing band led by William “Count” Basie.  Often fronted by the famed blues shouter, Jimmy Rushing, the band threw a combination of sophisticated jazz, blues, field hollers, swing, popular melodies and gospel rhythms into one boiling pot.  The resultant brew was then poured piping hot in all directions of dance halls.

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With the inauguration of Barack Obama in little more than a month and the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in  two months, it's interesting to read Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation--for what it did (and didn't) do.  I knew that it only freed the slaves in those states in rebellion against the United States (see link below), but I didn't know how much of Louisiana and Virginia WERE NOT covered by the Proclamation.

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Richard Thompson Ford opined in last Sunday's Boston Globe (5/17/09) that the civil rights movement should move on from the strategies of the Jim Crow era.  I agree with him (in part) because some of the problems he proposes to address, e.g., incarceration of black males, under-performance in school, unacceptable articulatory skills, etc., require new strategies, but they are not entirely new.  They are vestigial elements of the Jim Crow era that "integration" didn't fix.  Perhaps it is time to resuscitate community involvement like that which emptied the segregated buses in Montgomery in 1956 and registered millions in the get-out-the-vote effort for candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

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