Issues — Black History Month 2024

Robinson’s Republicanism, coupled with the fact that he was a high-performance athlete who believed in objective measures of merit and the validity of competition, explain why he hated the idea of lowering standards for Blacks. In this regard he is not different from Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and the late Stanley Crouch.

Opera aficionados and many St. Louisans already knew about her. Somehow, I did not. Being in Bumbry’s presence magnified my own desires to pursue the creative arts, travel the globe, and know more than one language. Very much like another famous St. Louisan Josephine Baker, Grace Bumbry’s life and story shattered the limitations of what is possible for Black Americans.

Mothers sewed these quilts when everyone else was asleep, so there was no time to fuss over the details. For batting, they beat the dirt out of trash cotton or swept the floor of the cotton gin. Quilts were women’s work, therefore practical and unquestioned. How were these women to know, tucked into a paper-clip curve of the Alabama River with scant access to the rest of the world, that their quilts echoed the best and most daring modern art?

This photo, like so many of those in Michael Eastman’s beautiful, moving, beguiling, maddening collection, transmutes history into timelessness. The house stands alone outside of time. It is a token of the past detached from its actual and ongoing social history.

The deep-seated cause of this feeling of hostility does not spring from the actions of Americans who go to Latin-America but from the treatment accorded to Latin-Americans who come to the United States. In truth, the whole question is involved in our own national and local Negro problem.

Three rich histories give us the lived experiences of persons negotiating a racialized class system. These new narratives are instructive because Black Americans, despite class being violently raced in the United States, have had robust internal conversations within their own walls about what life as men and women, entrepreneurs, professionals, and essential workers mean in democratic conversation one to another.

This story reminds the reader of what is possible when groups of people who are separated by oceans, continents, and lived experiences share a love for the same sport.