Campaign Zero Unveils Effort to Track Troublesome Police Union Contracts – CityLab

A new effort from Campaign Zero looks at how police unions push to hide information on officer misconduct.

Source: Campaign Zero Unveils Effort to Track Troublesome Police Union Contracts – CityLab

Floyd Little Double Dutch Steps Up – Video – NYTimes.com

A new double dutch league shows up the competition in Newark.

Source: Floyd Little Double Dutch Steps Up – Video – NYTimes.com

Honor Them on Common Ground

I have lived in the footprints of the enslaved, recovered their words, songs and ideas, bowed in their churches, prayed in their sleeping quarters, sang sea island burial and field spirituals and angry paeans (“Lay Down Body,” “Lord, Lent Me Your Walking Shoe,” “Why Me Here, Lord?”) on long abandoned village grounds, the words echoing through empty windows and I remember the Boone Hall rehearsal when the spirits of the ancestors showed up. As one whose daughter at a Tuck’s classmate’s wedding in Accra returned from Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle to say the anger felt in the air is deep and undisturbed—I am one who reaches back into history’s wisdom for its inner experience to bring it into sight—I say no. It’s a great idea. It needs to be guided by the old ways.

Cabins and dreams were smells in the air and laughs now gathering dust in the archives; beauty and abundance flowed from the very institution appointed to stop all human progress for Africans. Preserve these cabins sites, homes of families, the host of unknown memories, with a trail.

Individuals, families, and communities far and near will share, visit and contribute along unique journeys of discovery and build a vibrant institution. Meeting others and sharing knowledge is original to the enslaved community! Then and now, newly arrived encounter a culture which informs, welcomes, and shares. A trail focuses these experiences through people interaction. Guided conversations highlight craft, history, culture and ideas.

A decentralized trail multiples stakeholders. It attracts new ones. With thousands of easy entries, a trail easily transmits engagement, exchanges and encounters in all directions. A trail spreads economic benefits to a vast, easily expanded network of locals. The trail would an intentional home for safe conversations and rest. South Carolina has in place as a model for study, the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor (shared with NC,GA, FL).

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In a trail, stands of surviving cabins and early freedom dwellings and school would become nodes tied a network of branching sites. These sites would have a platform and stimulus to share unique, local themes: their industry, cooking, arts, faith, speech, customs, cultural sites.

This way, the nation would preserve important history sites and save many deteriorating badly and collapsing. It also preserves the authentic social features of an amazingly varied experience uniquely shaped by locals. The best way to see slavery’s common threads is through local experience.

A trail fits with the Park Service mission of developing historic corridors, and with the USDA Forestry Department’s goal of creating new urban and rural trails celebrating culture, heritage and eco-tourism.

Dusting off history’s footprints, I offer as my gift to all Times readers this season, from the Library of Congress archives of the WPA slave narratives. this funny story from Edisto Island, SC, an allegory and faith adventure about “Old John,” and his community.

The story’s free pdf also has a photo of Barack visiting Cape Coast. It has rare cover art–engraved images of oils and watercolors of signares (African women) at an annual ball dance in St. Louis, Senegal; images of the Wolof; circa 1840-60s, first printed in 1890. [http://bit.ly/1OHPGr1].]

Slavery is a national story! But see why I think it should be decentralized, and broadened, as an economic model? How much of the collective would be left out?

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Those of us in the game, as guides, performers, history tellers, reenactors, event planners, writers, travel directors, site mangers know what happens when a big history story is centralized. The non-profit corporate big box attracts attention by size and budget and may snuff growth.

Maine minimizes corporate dominance (both profit and non-profit) by using local facilities as a tourist model. It provides greater opportunities for new experiences.

In fact, put every Confederate monument on the trail; interpret their stories: Wade Hampton, SC’s largest property holder, stopped SC twice from seceding and received wide black support when he ran for governor, a Southern man totally different than fellow governors “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman or Coleman Blease who advocated lynching and violence and offered blacks no protections or rights. See Strom Thurmond’s bi-racial daughter’s name with his family’s on his official state monument, a place to talk about race, secrecy and power.

Confederates created disenfranchising constitutions and a feudal system (sharecropping) after the war, they should not be left out! (In the 1930s, Dorothea Lange photographed former slaves in their eighties who had worked for shares their whole lives.)

Imagine phones that let you call distant sites to speak to visitors for updates, the responsibility the enslaved had for communication. The pillars of survival are pillars of communication: how to think, talk, and laugh.

My three replies (above) to America Needs a National Slavery Monument – The New York Times: [http://nyti.ms/1INHoYl].

The Annual Ball. In St. Louis, Senegal. The capital of Senegal before 1902. Engravings published in a Paris expedition book of Africa, 1890.

Marion Post shot the image below in outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi in November 1939.