Tag: race

If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’

Charles Mingus, in response to a bomb threat at a 1972 Yale University concert.
He continued to play, and “coming from inside [the otherwise evacuated hall] was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit […] going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling.”
Wow.

Old McDonnell’s Farm

The previous post seems irretrievably glib and insufficient when compared to this:

[…] not only does McDonnell venerate those who took up arms against their own country, he does so without acknowledging that the institution for which they fought was the right to preserve the right to own human beings as slaves. He then papers over the horrors of reconstruction, lynching, and Jim Crow that followed.

This isn’t a coincidence. There is no place in which a frank acknowledgment of the realities of the South prior to the Civil War or immediately following can possibly coincide with a veneration of the Confederacy. So McDonnell just leaves that history out. When McDonnell talks about “all Virginians,” it becomes painfully clear that he isn’t.

(h/t jasencomstock)

Old McDonnell’s Farm