Foster Dickson's Blog, page 40
July 19, 2019
(Unpublished) #Poem: “The Clamor”
This poem is one in a series of seven religious poems that I wrote in late 2011 and early 2012. Among the series, it had no title; none of these poems did. I was writing them around the time when I was baptized and joined the Catholic Church in my late thirties, and also shortly after the sudden death of my father. Looking back on the poems, I find them hopeful and searching, but also with an aggravation, typical of me, toward the common propensity to muck up the silence needed to consider important ideas.
The Clamor
Small hints of paradise clamor together
begging for attention, but we are too busy
wondering what any of it has to do with us.
Rearranging angels’ songs into ditties
we will hum while we work, into confections
we will consume for dinner, into wine
we will use to get to sleep, into puff pastries
we will transform and sell as dry goods.
Instead, I request sweet honey to help
digest vegetable, meat, and mineral; for you,
my brothers and sisters, are clamoring
so carelessly, so wildly, that I cannot hear
my God, whose voice is in the whipping winds
unwinding the twisted truths that blast Man’s
made mountains down to simple sand.
More than ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:
“Just Wait” • “I should’ve been George Willard” • a haiku series
“Don’t Nobody Even Like You” • “Point to Something Red” • “Yes, I Know”
“They Come, Growling” • “Lost Things” • “Taking Root” • “Sabbatical”
“Southern Soil” • “I Know” • “Common” • “Zero” • [Untitled]
“Reading Kenko” • “Curb Market, Saturday Morning” • “Greatest Unknown”
July 18, 2019
Love + Marriage: The Fitzgerald Museum’s Annual Literary Contest
[image error]Last year, it was “What’s Old Is New.” This year, it’s “Love + Marriage.” The Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest for students opens its submissions period on September 1, 2019. For more information, please see the guidelines below— and please feel free to share them with any parents, teachers, students, and organizations that may be interested, as well as with any media outlets that may be willing to spread the word. As contest coordinator, I’ll be glad to answer any questions that folks may have, or questions can be directed to the museum.
The Fitzgerald Museum Literary Contest: Love + Marriage
F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald were daring and revolutionary in their lives and in their art and writing. One hundred years after their 1919 wedding in Montgomery, Alabama, the Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is seeking to identify and honor the daring and revolutionary young writers and artists of this generation.
Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Multi-Genre
Categories: Grades 9–10, Grades 11–12, Undergraduate
General Guidelines for 2019 – 2020:
The Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest is seeking submissions of short fiction, poetry, and multi-genre works that exhibit themes of love and marriage. Works with traditional forms and styles will be accepted, yet writers are encouraged to send works that utilize innovative forms and techniques. Literary works may include artwork, illustrations, font variations, and other graphic elements, with the caveat that these elements should enhance the work, not simply decorate the page.
The submissions period is open from September 1 until December 31, 2019. Works will be judged in three separate age categories, so please be clear about that category. Submissions should not exceed ten pages (with font sizes no smaller than 11 point). Each student may only enter once. Awards will be announced by March 16, 2020. Each category will have a single winner and possibly an honorable mention.
Submissions should be sent to fitzgeraldliterarycontest@gmail.com with “Literary Contest Submission” in the subject line and relevant information in the email. Due to issues of compatibility, works should be attached as PDFs to ensure that they appear as the author intends. Files should be named with the author’s first initial [dot] last name [underscore] title. For example, J.Smith_InnovativeStory.pdf.
This year’s judges are Kwoya Fagin Maples for the undergraduate category and Joe Taylor for the high school categories. Maples is the author of the poetry collection Mend, teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and is currently an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Taylor is a professor at the University of West Alabama, an editor at Livingston Press, and the author of six novels and story collections. For more information, contact the Fitzgerald Museum or contest coordinator Foster Dickson.
July 17, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Thinking One Way, Voting Another”
[image error]The Spring 2017 Alabama Public Opinion Survey, conducted by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA), shows some disturbing conclusions about the political ideas in my home state. Hardest to swallow are two graphs on page 23, which explain that 63% of the people polled “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” that they “Have No Say in What the Government in Montgomery Does” and a whopping 69% “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” that “Officials in Montgomery Don’t Care What People Like Me Think.” The polling from 2007 through 2017 shows that roughly half to two-thirds of Alabamians feel that way consistently.
Likewise, a few pages ahead of those disconcerting line graphs, we see a bar graph that explains how 76.7% of Alabamians polled answered “Yes” when asked, “Do you think the level of school funding makes a difference in the quality of education?” (Somehow, 17.3% of respondents answered “No,” and I’d be curious about how they came to that conclusion.) About three-quarters of Alabamians, then, believe the old adage that “you get what you pay for” when it comes to our education system.
July 16, 2019
Dirty Boots: “Reflecting on the National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy”
Two weeks ago, I attended Arizona State University’s week-long National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy, which was held on the campus of the University of Montana in Missoula, and while the overt lessons presented during the professional-development workshop were about sustainability – obviously – peripheral discussions among the participants also caught my attention. Granting that these attendees were probably more progressive than average, I found two things remarkable as I listened: how behind the times we truly down here in the Deep South, and how many people around the country are humbly and thanklessly working to make it better.
[image error]One of the prime lessons of the academy was to underscore that the idea of sustainability is not solely environmental, but must also include an understanding of society and the economy. A sustainable model for living, working, consuming, and disposing of waste must be equitable and just, answering the needs of all people involved. We’re going to consume the food, energy, and other goods that are required in our lives, certainly, but a sustainable approach would take into account the effects of that usage, including an honest assessment of who enjoys the benefits and who bears the burdens. Using a historical example from the South, an economy built on slavery was never a sustainable, because the people who bore the greatest burdens received the fewest benefits. Using another, more recent example from close to home, a shift to renewable energy sources could not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it would also alleviate the dumping of coal ash in places like Uniontown, Alabama— in part because there would be less (or no) coal ash to dump!
Also close to home, I realized during the academy how ordinary Alabamians are not asked, much less required, to be active participants in sustainability efforts. As teachers from New Jersey and Vermont talked about separating their trash, recycling, and composting, both at home and at school, all I could think about was how my city’s recycling program has crashed twice in recent years, and how I was going back to my school to start a composting program. But that wasn’t all. One teacher from Iowa told us about how he had returned acres upon acres of what had been his family farm to being tallgrass prairie again. Another from Colorado showed us videos of taking students on week-long trips down the rapids on the canyons, where they learned to travel light and not to leave waste behind. Yet another worked for an organization that plants and cares for trees and orchards in urban Philadelphia . . .
(Perhaps the most eye-opening thing was that some people in America use a bidet. I’ve seen these things in movies and in a high-end hotels when I’ve traveled, but I didn’t think anyone actually used one. What I learned is that, even though a bidet uses water in place of toilet paper, the practice actually uses less water overall, since the water used in making toilet paper has to be factored in. I’m still not sure whether I’d want to wash my butt instead of wiping it, but it’s something to be aware of.)
Despite my chagrin at the situation here at home, a brief web search when I returned did reveal that we aren’t devoid of sustainability programs in Alabama. The first page or two of web search results show that the University of Alabama, UA branch campuses in Birmingham and Huntsville, and Auburn University all have programs in place, as do the cities of Birmingham and Huntsville. Likewise, the US Green Building Council’s webpage describes school-based sustainability projects around state. And a number of environmental nonprofits are working hard all the time to encourage and enable better ways of living, farming, eating, breathing, learning, building, making, and doing business.
The missing piece, it seems to me, is the grassroots effort – what organizational folks like to call “stakeholder involvement” – which would mean asking Alabama’s four-plus-million people to change some of our daily habits and, perhaps more importantly, some ingrained albeit unproductive mindsets. To implement more sustainable systems, we have to ask all people to have sustainable daily practices. I know that the challenges are real – how to pay for it, how to enforce new policies – but it’s high time we think about how and try something, instead of just lamenting the difficulties or, worse, giving up before before we even begin.
Despite what people in other parts of the country may call our state, our moniker is “Alabama the Beautiful.” However, the website WalletHub ranks our state 45th in their list of “Greenest States,” and within that, 48th in “Eco-Friendly Behaviors.” We also rank 37th in the US News state pollution rankings. Understanding sustainability as not only environmental, but also social and economic, I can’t help but tie those facts to social-justice issues the state also faces: inadequate schools, a dependence on federal funds, weak public services, a regressive tax system— all of which are unsustainable. Alabama should be beautiful for all of its people, not just the ones leading comfortable lives. As the old adage goes: a rising tide lifts all boats.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To read find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.
July 12, 2019
Disrupters & Interlopers: Theresa Burroughs
Mrs. Theresa Burroughs was an active worker for civil rights and voting rights in the Black Belt of Alabama. Looking through news coverage and other documents describing the movement in Hale County and nearby areas, Burroughs name appears often.
Burroughs was born Theresa Turner in 1929, as the Great Depression began, in already depressed western Alabama. She married a mechanic named Kenneth Burroughs, and the couple had four children. After earning a degree in cosmetology, she became a beautician and opened her own business, Burroughs Beauty Bar.
Though she had already been leading voting rights efforts in Hale County, Burroughs’ notoriety increased in March 1965 when she was among the marchers attacked by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Three years later, in March 1968, she also hid Martin Luther King, Jr. from white supremacists in Greensboro who sought him as a target for further violence. However, her civil-rights organizing did not end in the ’60s. Due to the persistent nature of local white-supremacist resistance, it continued; Burroughs is even named as still active in Hale County in a 1983 editorial by JL Chestnut, Jr.
In the 2000s, Burroughs worked with the Rural Studio to create Greensboro, Alabama’s Safe House Black History Museum, which opened in 2009. The restored shotgun house is a memorial to the movement years, specifically to the night she sheltered King.
Theresa Burroughs passed away in Greensboro, Alabama in May 2019, at the age of 89. To learn more about her, StoryCorps has an interview with her and daughter Toni Love. Roy Hoffman’s book Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations also devotes a chapter to her.
The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo. To read previous posts, click any of the links below:
July 11, 2019
#throwbackthursday: the Dexter Avenue paintings, 2009
Before Montgomery’s twenty-first century revitalization had hit its stride, quite a few of the storefronts on Dexter Avenue, downtown’s main thoroughfare, were covered in paintings by a local artist who, I assume, was given the freedom to use the mostly boarded-up sites as his canvasses. Some of the paintings depicted Biblical scenes, while others were brighter and more lively images of local figures. The pictures were taken ten years ago, in the summer of 2009.
July 10, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “My Source for Some Definitive”
In the “People” section of the April 26, 1989 issue of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, the headline read, “It’s Full Speed Ahead for Local Indigo Girls.” The article below explained that the folk-rock duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers was on tour with REM, had an album that had gone gold, was about to appear on the David Letterman Show, and had plans to tour with both Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Furthermore, their first single “Closer to Fine” was scheduled to “be shipped to commercial radio stations nationally in late May.” That was thirty years ago today.
Other mentions in the Constitution from that summer shared that the Indigo Girls album had moved up to #74 on the Billboard charts by July, and in late August was at #55. As 1990 began, The Indigo Girls were Grammy-nominated, in the Best New Artist and Best Contemporary Folk Album categories. They won the award in the latter.
Though it never reached the top-ten on the Billboard charts, that album’s first single “Closer to Fine” may be one of the most influential songs from Generation X. Alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Teen Angst,” and “Alive,” “Closer to Fine” grabs at something that a lot of us felt as we foraged through our teenage years at a time when the cheesy ’80s were shifting gears into the fin de siecle angst of the ’90s.
July 9, 2019
Dirty Boots: “Our Last-ness”
[image error]In Alabama, thinkers from all points on the political spectrum seem to enjoy raising the issue of our last-ness. Whether the tone toward the facts is deep consternation, an indifferent shrug, or something in-between, the tendency to comment on or allude to our position at the bottom spans the boundaries of race, gender, class, and political affiliation. We all seem to have something to say about it— me included.
US News & World Report currently ranks Alabama as 49th overall among the states, with a breakdown showing that we’re 50th in Education, 46th in Healthcare, and 45th in the categories of Economy, Opportunity, and Crime & Corrections. The only shining light there is being ranked 23rd in Fiscal Stability, which I take to mean that our situation is more likely than half the states’ to stay how it is. (Despite the dark humor of saying “Thank God for Mississippi,” Louisiana actually came in last, while the Magnolia State was in the slot above us.)
Alabama also has the worst prison system in the nation, including the highest murder rates within those prisons. The system houses about 16,000 inmates in conditions so severely overcrowded, unclean, and unsafe that the US Department of Justice has declared them to be unconstitutional. We lack both a statewide public defender system and strong rehabilitation programs, which leads us to put too many people in prison for too long. A recent news report from al.com shared that, if Alabama was country, not a state, we would have the 5th highest incarceration rate in the world:
Alabama’s rate of incarceration – at 987 people in jail or prison for every 100,000 people – dwarfs those of every nation around the globe, including those of troubled countries like Iraq, Cuba and Syria.
Last month, a report from Annie E. Casey Foundation ranked Alabama 44th in child well-being, with a break down of 44th in Economic Well-Being, 38th in Education (in contrast to US News saying 50th), 36th in Health, and 44th in Family & Community. What appears to have helped us in the Health area was AllKids, a children’s health insurance program for low-income families. The confusing side of this report is that Alabama improved in sub-areas but dropped two spots in the overall ranking. The disheartening side of it is reading that we have 265,000 children living in poverty and 24,000 teenagers who are neither in school nor working.
In addition to those rankings, CDC statistics also rank Alabama second-to-last in infant mortality with a rate of 9.6 per 1,000. Mississippi really was worse this time – much worse, at 11.5 – though four other states’ rates came close to ours (between 9.0 and 9.5) The national average is 5.8, a rate we nearly double. Infant mortality is a particularly dubious category, since it concerns the number of babies that die before their first birthday. This dismal fact is one of several, too, that relate to our children.
Furthermore, as peripheral consequence of our consistent refusal to deal with deplorable conditions, unproductive systems, and errant personalities, Alabama’s 4.7 million residents also endure every kind of harassment, from the jibes of comedians to threats of boycotts on social media. In recent years alone, our state’s historical footprint, which already included slavery, J. Marion Sims, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, George Wallace, and resistance to Civil Rights, has added Roy Moore, Goodloe Sutton, and a super-strict anti-abortion laws to an already intense litany.
Personally, I’m more interested in remedies for our last-ness than in the sheer fact of it, and I only see one viable long-term fix: to rewrite Alabama’s state constitution to create a new system of governance that works in the twenty-first century. Our current governing document was crafted nearly 120 years ago with the express goal “to establish white supremacy in this State,” and it is outmoded, outdated, and outlandish. This constitution concentrates power in the state legislature, which has control over budgets, lawmaking, everything, even some local matters. Looking at it pragmatically, a new constitution could be written to achieve a balance of powers, and systems could be designed to achieve modern and worthwhile goals, as opposed to continuing a system that was created to serve ugly and hateful goals and to suit a time that does not resemble ours. The solution is not to elect different officials— the solution, which will require courage, fortitude, and honesty, is to re-design the system under which those officials operate. Then, maybe, if we reboot Alabama’s politics entirely, we can begin a true journey toward progress.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To read find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.
July 8, 2019
#ICYMI: Closed Ranks
– Alabama Writers Forum
From the publisher’s description:
On a chilly December afternoon in 1975, Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 33-year-old father of four, was mistaken for a robbery suspect by Montgomery, Alabama, police officers. A brief foot chase ensued, and it ended with one of the pursuing officers shooting and killing Whitehurst in the backyard of an abandoned house. The officer claimed the fleeing man had fired at him; police produced a gun they said had been found near the body. In the months that followed, new information showed that Whitehurst, who was black, was not only the wrong man but had been unarmed, a direct contradiction of the white officer’s statement. What became known as the Whitehurst Case erupted when the local district attorney and the family’s attorney each began to uncover facts that pointed to wrongdoing by the police, igniting a year-long controversy that resulted in the resignation or firing of police officers, the police chief, and the city’s popular New South mayor. However, no one was ever convicted in Whitehurst’s death, and his family’s civil lawsuit against the City of Montgomery failed. Now, more than four decades later, Whitehurst’s widow and children are waging a 21st-century effort to gain justice for the husband and father they lost. The question that remains is: who decides what justice looks like?
In this latter-day exploration of the Whitehurst Case, author Foster Dickson reviews one of Montgomery’s never-before-told stories, one which is riddled with incompatible narratives. Closed Ranks brings together interviews, police reports, news stories, and other records to carry the reader through the fraught post-civil rights movement period when the “unnecessary” shooting of Bernard Whitehurst Jr. occurred.
In our current time, as police shootings regularly dominate news cycles, this book shows how essential it is to find and face the truth in such deeply troubling matters.
Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery was published by NewSouth Books in November 2018. Copies can be purchased from major retailers like Amazon and ordered through local retailers.
July 7, 2019
Thank you, Herschel Gaston and WKCG!
[image error]Thank you to Herschel Gaston and producer Antwan Hillman for having me as a guest on Real Talk with Herschel yesterday! During the second hour of the program, we talked about the Closed Ranks and the Whitehurst Case, Montgomery’s history and politics, and the legacy of social justice after a police shooting. WKCG 99.1 FM is based in Dothan, Alabama.
Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery was published by NewSouth Books in November 2018. Copies can be purchased from major retailers like Amazon and ordered through local retailers.
