Tag Archives: Harper Lee

On Obama, Lincoln, and Compromise

Saturday’s New York Times had a column by African American novelist Ishmael Reed attacking those leftists that are excoriating President Obama for his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for a second stimulus package. What particularly galls Reed is that many of these critics refer to themselves as Obama’s base (as in, […]

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Mockingbird, Powerful but Problematic

Harper Lee  National Public Radio reminded me yesterday that this summer is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I have written a couple of times about the book, once talking about its importance to me growing up in the segregated south and once examining Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of […]

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How Racism Sullies Everything

If race has been the subject of these past two weeks of posting it is because, as a Sherrilyn Ifil article notes in the on-line publication Root, we are having a hard time talking about race this summer, what with the furor over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination and the Henry Louis Gates affair.  I haven’t […]

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Mockingbird’s Race Limitations

  An interesting Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker has complicated my views of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I posted on last week.  I now better understand why the book, while a comfort to me as a child going through the desegregation battles, proved so inadequate when I went […]

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Desegregation Tales from My Childhood

  I mentioned yesterday the debt I owe to the NAACP, which this year is celebrating its 100-year anniversary.  Today I will talk about some of my past history with the organization, along with a discussion of how Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird helped me in some difficult years during the Civil Rights era. I’ve […]

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