Jesse Epps will be in New York on Thursday afternoon to speak about the future, carrying a credential from history.
He spent the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, talking with Martin Luther King Jr about a march in support of the city's sanitation workers, who were striking for wages that would permit them to get off welfare and live in homes with indoor toilets. Just a week before, an earlier march turned into a bedlam, with stores looted, the crowd gassed and King hustled into a car by aides. For King, the event had been an embarrassing, dispiriting rout. He came back to Memphis to salvage the strikers' cause and his reputation.
Seated in that US$13-a-day room, Epps assured King that this time all the churches in town were rallying behind the strikers. "We talked about the fact that the safety and security had come a long way from where we had begun," said Epps, a labor organizer who had been sent to Memphis by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
PHOTOS: AP AND NY TIMES NEWS SERIVCE
They wound up their meeting, and King declined an invitation to dine with Epps. He was already due at the home of a minister for supper. He washed up, knotted a fresh tie. A few of his people were in the parking lot outside, so he stepped onto the balcony outside Room 306 to tell them about the dinner plans. A single shot brought him down.
The echoes of that instant have carried 40 years. They can be heard around New York in the most casual of conversations about national politics, 2008: among strangers in a subway car, friends at dinner, people on their jobs. For some, the very strength of Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has dragged the thought of violence out of the shadows of the unspeakable.
A church worker and military veteran who is rooting for Obama said last week in Harlem, "Obama, I hope you don't get a bullet."
PHOTOS: AP AND NY TIMES NEWS SERIVCE
A much younger man, Joseph Solomon Jones, 25, held in the same thought high hopes and pure fatalism about the Obama campaign.
"He's very educated, very fluent in what the people want," said Jones, a college student in Brooklyn. "Obama, I want him to be president. First black president, all right, I'll take that. Even though he's going to get shot after that."
Now 71, Epps, who is due to speak at a King commemoration at Trinity Church on Wall Street that is being sponsored by the city's sanitation workers union, said that the world had been reborn many times since 1968. Yet he sees how the anxiety over Obama's safety runs in counterpoint to the elation over his successes. "That is a question I am hearing among the brethren," he said.
PHOTOS: AP AND NY TIMES NEWS SERIVCE
Modern history does not permit such worries to be brushed off, regardless of whether the source of danger is seen as some dark unnamed force, or simply a deranged person driven to lash out at a Kennedy or a King, a Wallace or a Reagan.
Alma Powell, the wife of Colin Powell, spoke bluntly about her fears in 1995 when Powell was weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination. "He would probably be at much more risk than any other candidate because of being a black man in this society," Powell said. "A lot of crazy people out there."
In a speech on Sunday night, Michelle Obama, the wife of Obama, lightly traced the twisting byways of that anxiety. "There are still voices, even within our own community, that focus on what might go wrong," she said in Atlanta. "It's not just about fear, people. It's also about love. I know people want to protect themselves and us from disappointment and failure, from the possibility of being let down again - not by us, but by the world as it is. A world that we fear might not be ready for a decent man like Barack."
For Epps, who was instrumental in persuading King to come to Memphis for the sanitation workers, the history of that moment leads him not to worries, but to strategy.
"When they cut down the leader, the work is going to go on," he said. "Get rid of Mrs Clinton, you have Mr Obama. You get rid of both of them, you get Mr Edwards. A flock of geese will move to protect the lead goose from the hunter."
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and