Pressing Flesh

In the summer of 1966 I was standing with my father at the Lower Mills station outside of Boston. We were headed to work. Him for New England Tel and Tel. Me at a restaurant dishwashing. A Mattapan-bound trolley stopped to let off a crowd. My father and I were mystified by the hubbub, until the trolley pulled away from the platform and we spotted Robert F. Kennedy.

The forty year-old politician was campaigning for his brother Ted.

My father was a staunch Republican from the State of Maine, but sensed an opportunity to meet the future president of the USA and rushed me across the track to RFK, where the young NY senator was pressing flesh with his admirers. He shook my hand and I wished him good luck. Our trolley was approaching and my father and I ran to the other side. Once seated on the trolley, a passenger asked us, "Who was that.

My father said, "The next president."

We prayed for that future, but two years later after winning the California primary a gunman shot RFK dead in LA.

It's been over fifty-three years since his death and every day of this presidential election it what becomes clear is that America and the world lost a great deal more than a man's life.

I cried that day and I cried recently watching Ted Kennedy's eulogy in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

"Some men see thing as they are and ask why, my brother dreams things that never were and asked why not."

No one in politics talks like that today

In 1989 I was vacationing in LA. My friend Adriana Kaegi of Kid Creole and the Coconuts was working on a video for the LAMBADA at the then-deserted Ambassador Hotel. I was a little hung-over and didn't think much about the significance of the location until I wandered into the Embassy ballroom and said to myself, "I've been here before."

Not in person, but I climbed onto the stage where RFK announced his victory. I stood at the dusty podium. His hands might have touched the wood and I looked to the left.

The kitchen door was open.

Rosie Grier was RFK's bodyguard. The enormous black ex-LA Rams linebacker was supposed to protect the candidate from the crowds. Later he said that the candidate's security plans called for an exit through the audience, however someone yelled, "No, Bobbie this way.

And RFK entered the kitchen. 

The film portrays the exuberant chaos and then a man sticks a .22 in the face of RFK and pulls the trigger.

Standing in that empty kitchen I realized this was a killer's killing zone. There was nowhere for the victim to run.

I cried once more for the loss of RFK

We are not the same as we were in 1968, although the trolley into Ashmont from Lower Mills is still free as it was on that day in 1966 and that is a good thing.

We miss you Bobby.

  And Martin and Malcolm Biggie and Tupac and thousands more murdered by the powers that be aand they are still murdering. Resist. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8rxSYMi-c&feature=related

Abe And Marilyn and Blackula

Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclaimation in 1863. Slaves were freed throughout the South. Their liberation awaited the arrival on the Union Army.

"Free at last, hallelujah."

The unchained darkies' paradise last a few years, as after Appomatox the South instituted Jim Crow laws aimed at their subjugation to sharecropper lands. The police and mobs below the Mason-Dixon Line punished any loose-tongued niggers with the noose. Lynchings occurred with frightening regularity and Africans fled the South throughout the 20th Century in hopes of better days, only to have Northern factory owners conspire to break the spirit of blacks by underpaying their worth. The 1919 Tulsa Massacre taught spades that no place safe existed for a black man, woman, or child in White America.

I taught high school in South Boston during the Bussing battles of the 1970s.

A Massachusetts state judge had ordered the Boston School Committee to rectify the racial imbalances within the city without including the lily-white suburbs. Poor Irish teenagers had been transported to the poorer neighborhoods of Roxbury.

Divide and conquer amongst the old slaves, for the Irish had also been transported to the Americas as slave as well as the Africans of the West Coast.

And nowadays the battle lines are drawn by color.

Black and their supporters versus an aging White America threatened by the rising number of Latinos and Chinese flocking to the fifty states. Riches and safety await them, because White America is only interested in keeping down the blacks.

A black man has to know his place and that is why Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.

He mouthed off to a white cop.

Treyvon was murdered, because he was a black boy in a hoodie.

Akai Gurley had it coming, because he was black.

Tamir Rice was shot dead by cops.

At least one a day in these United States.

And white people say these killings are not racist. Cops kill blacks to insure Nat Turner and his slave rebellion was a one-off.

No, they are almost right. Cops kill people, because they are poor and dead men can't tell their side of the story.

Whites prefer the nice lies by the people they have entrusted to protect them from the blacks.

Murder is just another price to pay for sleeping safe and sound at night.

ZZZZZZZZZ.

In your sleep.

Blackula will come to get you, whitey.

Me too, but I'm eating tons of garlic just in case. he's after all whites.

He looks more like Abe Lincoln than Marilyn Monroe and there is nothing I want more than Marilynula sucking my blood in bed.

I'm a sucked for a stone-cold dead blonde.

In Defense of Spike Lee

Back in 2014 a Abraham Lincoln lookalike visited Fort Greene on President's Day to promote Quicken Loans. They promo team offered $25 to put a photo of the ersatz Abe and #quickenloans on your Facebook page. I tried on my cellphone without success. The young girl gave me a card for trying and I purchased two bottles of wine for $18 at the liquor store on Fulton.

Some things never change.

Spike Lee doesn't feel the same way about Fort Greene with good reason.

At a speech at Pratt Institute the film director had attacked gentrification as an invasion of uncool white motherfuckers who call the police to quiet his jazz playing father and white couples bogarting Fort Greene like it was their birth right.

He's actually very funny about how realtors changed Bushwick to East Williamsburg, why there's more police protection and better schools.

This telling of the truth was met with anger by the newcomers and Uncle Tims like John McWhorter of Time Magazine without any mention of economic cleansing of Harlem, the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Brooklyn.

Spike Lee was speaking against reverse migration and for affordable housing.

"Where are we going to go?"

"People can not afford to live here anymore."

I know the story.

I was moved out of my place on East 10th Street.

I had lived there almost thirty years.

They and we know who they are don't want us here.

In Russia they call it a pogram.

'They' want the poor, minorities, and the disenfranchised to leave without a forwarding address.

Well, we ain't going right yet and I applaud Spike Lee telling the truth.

It has to be said and said by 'us'.

Not them.

To see Spike Lee's speech at Pratt Institute please go to this URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI73SRbi8AQ

List of 100 Black Americans

In 2002 Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante amassed list for his biographical dictionary 100 GREATEST AFRICAN AMERICANS. The illustrious names were listed alphabetically with # 1 being Hank Aaron and Malcolm X closed out the hundred. I recognized forty-one of them. Historical giants and thank to Wikipedia I read how the remaining fifty-nine African American contributed to the cause of freedom None of them were the Godfather of Soul James Brown, Celtics legend Bill Russell, Black Panther martyr Bobby Seale, or Medgar Evers just to mention a few absentees.

A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979)
Hiram Revels (1827–1901)
John Russwurm (1799–1851)
Benjamin "Pop" Singleton (1809–1900)
Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915)
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784)

Six of the fifty-nine.

Read about them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_African_Americans

They are still alive.