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Avant-garde

Avant-garde

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.

News source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/zaila-avant-garde-first-black-american-win-scripps-national-spelling-bee.html?fbclid=IwAR0ruTu8ZreH7E_2BwnKEZ39ENaH99VeuUwXef8WzgSiXl-szr2vwthI0fI

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/)

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