Yer’d think dat some great folks done come
Like Linctom, Grant and Douglas wuz,
Er ‘batin’ human ri’ts upon
De public square in Dixie, c’uz
Et kinder ‘pears dat way to me.
—from the poem “Nicknames” by Samuel Alfred Beadle (born,1857 – died,1932) American poet and attorney, born the son of a slave in Atlanta, Georgia, and died in Chicago, Illinois.
I’m Jewish White
maybe have no right
to write that way;
some others did
like when Harris
wrote down those words
“Brer Rabbit had a mighty
quick thinkin’ apple-ratus,
an’ mos’ inginner’lly,
all de time, de pranks he played
on de yuther creeturs pestered um
bofe ways a-comin’ an’ a-gwine.”
Or Twain putting on paper
Jim saying what’s on his mind
to Huck just before chapter IX
“Yes—en I’s rich now,
come to look at it. I owns mysef”
But anyways, a 14 year old
African American won the
2021 Scripps National
Spelling Bee making
history as the first
Black American champion
In all its 96 years. Her name’s
appropriate too,
Zaila Avant-garde.
Afterword: “’Old Man Segregation is on his deathbed,’ Martin Luther King, Jr. said before a large audience at Holy Blossom [Jewish]Temple on a Thursday evening in March 1962. But he followed up with a warning…‘We must struggle for it. We must fight for it.’ Showing his usual eloquence over the course of his speech, King was optimistic that equality would be achieved: ‘The long arc of history bends towards justice.’” (From article in the Torontoist, March 21, 2015. https://torontoist.com/2015/03/historicist-the-long-arc-of-history-bends-towards-justice/)
