Foster Dickson's Blog, page 59

Disrupters & Interlopers: James Saxon Childers

Writer, editor, journalist, and teacher James Saxon Childers is far from a household name. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1899 and was raised there, then he was educated at Oberlin College and at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He returned to Birmingham in 1925 and taught English at the private liberal-arts college Birmingham-Southern until 1942. During that time, he wrote and published three novels, among them the bluntly titled A Novel about a White Man and a Black Man in the Deep South in 1936. The novel’s anti-segregation theme was unique for its time, exposing how the complex culture of the South prevents two men of different races from even having a friendship.

After serving in World War II, Childers got married, lived and wrote in North Carolina for several years, then moved to Atlanta in the early 195os to work for the Atlanta Journal. However, his vehemence about progress in race relations got him fired in 1956. By the late 1950s, Childers worked at the Atlanta-based publishing house, Tupper and Love. He died in 1965.

Brief biographies of James Saxon Childers are available at the Encyclopedia of Alabama and This Goodly Land websites. His papers are held at the Birmingham Public Library and at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

Though Childers and his 1936 novel are little known today, the book is significant enough to be mentioned briefly in George Tindall’s Emergence of the New South and in John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day as an early example of opposition to segregation. A 1936 review in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life said of the novel, “if it were just a little less tense and didactic, it would be a classic.”

The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “So what does that mean?”

The name of my blog comes from a poem I wrote entitled “Ain’t No Tellin’ What’ll Become of Me.” The poem was published in a Louisville-based literary magazine called Churches, Banks & Bars, which I don’t think is in print anymore. To me, the title phrase means that I am just one of those people who does the plodding work of not giving in to hopelessness. I’ll probably never be famous or revered or rich, or even remembered in the long run. I will never run for political office or start a movement. I am a classroom teacher and a writer. I’m just a “pack mule” in this whole ordeal.

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At the 2018 Alabama Book Festival, April 21

As we have every year since 2007, my creative writing students and I will be displaying our wares in the exhibitor area of the Alabama Book Festival again this year. At booth T-8, we will have copies of the 2018 issue of our literary magazine Graphophobia for sale for $5 each, as well as display copies of the fourteen past issues dating back to the magazine’s inception in 2004.

The Alabama Book Festival is held annually on the third Saturday in April in Montgomery’s Old Alabama Town. This year’s festival will be on Saturday, April 21. For more information about presenting authors and workshops, click here.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Old Agrarian-ness of a New Ethos”

In “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision,” originally published in 1980 in Virginia Quarterly Review and re-published online in 2003, the critic Lucinda H. Mackethan writes about “a group of Southern Americans profoundly disturbed by the lack of humane values operating in their world.” She was referring to the contributing authors in the Southern classic I’ll Take My Stand, a small group of perhaps overly nostalgic academics, poets, and critics who looked on a Northern-dominated, heavily industrial country with disdain. But in that phrase, she could have been writing about a lot of modern Southerners, from gun-loving ultra-conservative neophobes to the Gen-Xers who’ve started organic CSAs, letterpress shops, and microbreweries.

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Twelve-and-a-Half Years

Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. He was there to assist the cause of striking sanitation workers who held up now-famous signs that read “I AM A MAN,” and he was shifting his focus to what he called The Poor People’s Campaign. King had been a highly successful leader during the Civil Rights movement’s major events – the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 – 1956, the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 – and he had only suffered one (debatable) defeat: the lesser-known the Albany Movement of 1961 – 1962. His “I Have a Dream” speech and his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” remain two of the most iconic texts in American literature.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is probably the most important and recognizable American who never held a political office, a notion that is supported by the fact that his birthday is a federal holiday nonetheless. Though he was only 39 years old when he was killed, King changed not only our nation but the world in the twelve-and-a-half years between Rosa Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955 and his assassination on April 4, 1968.

Twelve-and-a-half years. Just think about that. The man’s impressive set of accomplishments were done just over a dozen years.

And how we have to think about young he was: only 26 years old when he led the Bus Boycott in Montgomery, and not yet 30 when said these words in his now-famous “Give Us the Ballot” speech in May 1957:

Stand up for justice. Sometimes it gets hard, but it is always difficult to get out of Egypt, for the Red Sea always stands before you with discouraging dimensions. And even after you’ve crossed the Red Sea, you have to move through a wilderness with prodigious hilltops of evil and gigantic mountains of opposition. But I say to you this afternoon: Keep moving. Let nothing slow you up. Move on with dignity and honor and respectability.

Six years later, King was only 34 when he proclaimed “I Have A Dream” in Washington, DC. Most people are just getting started. Sadly, Martin Luther King, Jr. was finished too soon.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Adia Victoria @ Saturn Birmingham”

I’ve got this friend who knows how much I like The New Yorker, but who is also aware that I don’t subscribe because I can’t seem to keep up with weekly magazines, so he passes on a stack to me after he’s piled up a few. When I get them, I thumb through each issue’s table of contents and fold them open to the articles I intend to read, relegating the others to the general-use stack in my classroom.

One morning, a few weeks ago, I grabbed one of those folded-back New Yorkers and hurried to the school bus stop for my monthly duty. I was flipping the pages and had just finished reading “Liberal-in-Chief,” Adam Gopnik’s piece about President Obama, when this woman’s stunningly solemn face appeared. Her glare was framed by a jet-black mod hairdo, and she was surrounded by tall wildflowers. This was Adia Victoria, the text below it explained.

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Magic Mic Monday: Intervention on Ice

I’ll be among the readers and performers for this event this afternoon/evening. If you’re a teacher in Montgomery, come out and see us.

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the #newschool: Easter Sunday

In chapter 8, verse 31 of his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul asks, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Shortly after that, in verse 35, he also asks, “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?” Whenever one of the major Christian holidays comes near, I hear that there is a “war” on Christianity, that Christmas and Easter are being so secularized and sanitized that they are losing their meaning . . . but that can only happen if faithful Christians allow it. As an addendum to St. Paul’s ancient questions, I want to share a modern one:

If Jesus could endure scourging and a crown of thorns from the Romans, insults and jibes from the same people who had flocked to him for healing, betrayal and abandonment by his Apostles, and after that, a slow death on a cross, then can’t we endure the misguided capitalism of corporate retailers and the nonspecific term “winter break” used by public schools?

In Matthew 10:14, Jesus tells his followers, “And if anyone does not welcome you or listen to what you have to say, as you walk out of the house or town shake the dust from your feet.” Easter is a day to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came as the Savior of all mankind, and all the fluffy bunnies and Cadbury Eggs in the world won’t change that— except maybe for a person so weak in faith that the simple pleasures found in chocolate candy and pastel colors can make him forget.

“Change in the world comes from individuals”

Change in the world comes from individuals, from the inner peace in individual hearts. Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far-reaching effects.

— Dalai Lama (@DalaiLama) March 30, 2018

 

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Truth-telling in the age of— what do we call it?”

We’re at an “oh no!” moment in our culture. No one can deny that. We are actually having arguments about whether facts exist and whether they matter. We are actually nonchalant about the idea that the Russians interfered with our presidential election. We are actually sitting on the time-bomb that is a game-show-host-turned-president, who will be inaugurated in just over a month.  And all of those problems – the “fake news,” the hacking, the president-elect – are being traced back to our adamant insistence on technology being all-pervasive in our culture.

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