National Memorial for Peace & Justice + Legacy Museum Now Open

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Despite the fact that the US has a well documented history of nearly two and a half centuries of legalized enslavement (1640-1865/66), enshrined in the US  Constitution; nearly another century of legalized apartheid known as Jim Crow (1876-1960-1980s?) and multiple de facto forms of explicitly racialized and class segregation (continuing today); and centuries of racist terror and enforced white supremacist terror, policing, brutality, and violence against peoples of African descent (as well as Native Americans and other non-white peoples), there have been relatively few national or regional museums or monuments recognizing this terrible history.

The aftermath of a lynching

Across the US there (rightly) museums calling attention to the horrific Nazi Holocaust against Jewish people that occurred in Germany and across much of Europe from the 1930s through 1945. There are specific museums and commemoration cites honoring specific African American figures, regional events, and particular moments, like Civil Rights history. Yet until very recently, there were only a few general museums specifically recognizing African American history and culture, and almost none calling attention to the horrendous legacy of slavery, segregation and racialized terror, all of which have contributed in numerous ways to shaping the society in which all Americans live today.

A sculpture commemorating
the brutal history of chattel slavery

Thankfully, Americans and people from all over the globe are flocking to the architecturally stunning National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, which provides an exceptionally thorough overview and celebration of the richness of African American and Black life in the United States and North America. (I wrote about visiting the NMAAHC last February.) To the NMAAHC, as of a week ago you can also now visit a museum that acknowledges the legacy of lynching, one of the most horrific manifestations of racialized terror in American history, as well as chattel slavery and its many afterlives, which include the carceral state. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both projects of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), opened in Montgomery, Alabama 2 weeks ago on April 26, 2018. According to its website,

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where enslaved people were once warehoused. A block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century....

The 11,000-square-foot museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery's proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery's prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America.

and

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff began investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. EJI was interested not only in lynching incidents, but in understanding the terror and trauma this sanctioned violence against the black community created. Six million black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of these "racial terror lynchings."

This research ultimately produced Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror in 2015 which documented thousands of racial terror lynchings in twelve states. Since the report’s release, EJI has supplemented its original research by documenting racial terror lynchings in states outside the Deep South. EJI staff have also embarked on a project to memorialize this history by visiting hundreds of lynching sites, collecting soil, and erecting public markers, in an effort to reshape the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials that more truthfully and accurately reflect our history.

African Americans re-enslaved
through convict leasing

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), established by public interest lawyer, author and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award-winner Bryan Stevenson in 1989, was long known for its impressive work providing legal aid to innocent death row prisoners and successfully exonerating a number of them, as well as its manifold efforts on behalf of economically and socially marginalized communities across the US. As Stevenson looked at the history of the US prison-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline and unequal applications of justice that African Americans faced, and the larger, profoundly skewed narrative about race in the US, he realized that one component of maintaining the structures and systems that allowed this narrative to take root was the absence of public recognition of the history that had helped to create it and the structures of oppression now in place, and one key element was the occluded history of US lynching, which usually went unpunished by federal or state authorities--and in the case of the latter, often had their complicity or tacit acquiescence--and which helped to support and further white supremacy and inequality.

Newly freed African Americans
in the post-Civil War era

Moreover, the absence of public museums and venues commemorating this history have helped in allowing narratives of white and national innocence to take hold; what the public doesn't know cannot exist, right? Out of site, out of mind. It only happened down there or far away, etc. Slavery ended and that was the end of it, right? Furthering this, the absence and silencing of the names of the more than 4,000 lynched, of their stories and voices, their families' and communities' traumas, except in specific works of art (films, photographic exhibits, works of fiction and nonfiction, etc.), has allowed the horror to become abstracted and thus, to a certain degree, ignored and dismissed. And yet, it waters the very soil and sand on which every American treads, much as the dispossession, forced removals and slaughter of Native Americans, to name but another frequently obscured component of US history does as well.

Stevenson and a group of fellow lawyers spent years delving into this history, combing through archives to notate names and stories of lynchings across the South, and documented roughly 4,400 across the South (though there were lynchings all over the US, including in the North and West), from 1877 to 1950, which are featured at the Memorial site. As a result, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice redresses this long silencing and invisibility; its architecturally striking building housing the tribute to those who were lynched and the site on which it sits have drawn considerable praise. The latter venue was inspired by the unforgettably powerful Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and by the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. To quote The New York Times's Campbell Robertson

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

At the second site, the Legacy Museum makes the connection between the slavery and apartheid past and the present prison system, showing how the past evolved into a system that continues to wreak havoc on countless Black and brown lives. As the Times article notes, the Museum guides the visitor through the compelling argument that Stevenson have made for how this system is still operating, ending on the hopeful note encouraging voter registration and political activism. Like the NMAAHC, where I witnessed groups of students eagerly queuing up to visit, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice should be obligatory sites for American school children to spend time and study. Given the current state of our politics and society, the US can only benefit as a result.


The Guardian interviews museum founder Bryan Stevenson:

Adrienne Kennedy's He Brought Her Heart Back In a Box

Adrienne Kennedy's (1931-) published plays, all of them, unfold according to the logic of dreams. Striking imagery and language, juxtaposition and jump-cuts in time, associative connections between characters, scenarios, moments, actions, and uncanny instances of personae and scenes split into multiples, or recombined in unexpected ways appear in various forms in her work, from her brilliant debut, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1960), to her most recent play, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (2018). Avant-garde from the beginning, Kennedy's plays nevertheless are anything but formalist or art-for-art's sake; her source material, evident in all of them, is her life experiences, and those of her relatives and friends, as well as the social, political and cultural histories in which those experiences have played out, transmuted into art via her profound interior vision. The result has been dramatic works that are deeply unsettling and unforgettable, like vivid nightmares.

Her newest play, which is making its debut at the Theater for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is no slouch in this regard. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is the 86-year-old Kennedy's first new play in 10 years, and the product of her move, roughly half a dozen years ago, to the Williamsburg, Virginia area, to live with her son, Adam Kennedy, a sometime-collaborator with her, and other family members, as she confided to reporter Alexis Soloski in a recent New York Times report. Though she purportedly detests the sleepy atmosphere and the town's insistent Southern historical pageantry, especially after decades of living in New York City, she penned the play in only six weeks, in a fit of rage, and includes in her inserted program notes the following acknowledgement:

"This play. Could not
have been written
without the room
Facing the trees and the
iPad given to me by my
son Adam Kennedy
And his wife Renee in
their house on the lane.

Kennedy's play is brief as full of life as a budding seed. It officially runs 45 minutes, but gave me the feeling, when I saw it, of being both far briefer and yet, because of the style, form and language, of being longer. He Brought Back Her Heart in a Box is loosely based on the author's mother's accounts of family lore, and takes place primarily in June 1941 in fictional Montefiore, Georgia, and New York. Kennedy's white grandfather owned peach orchards near Montezuma, Georgia, and the play transforms him into the town's white patriarch, Harrison Aherne. Actor Tom Pecinka, who makes his TFNA debut with this play, convincingly inhabits both Aherne, physically represented by a seated manikin whose stiff and ghostly presence looms over all the proceedings, and Harrison's grandson and heir, Chris Aherne, who develops affection for mixed race Kay, based in part on Kennedy's maternal grandmother, a 15-year-old girl who worked in the orchard, and died young, under unclear circumstances.

The conflicting stories about Kay's mother's death up north in Cincinnati are one thread. Was she killed by her white father or did she commit suicide?  Another spools out from Harrison, whom the audience learns had fathered numerous children by several Black women and even created a separate cemetery for the deceased among them, to the dismay of his white relatives. The fraught context of segregated Georgia, with its own codes for racial mixing, and a larger world descending into fascism and war, envelope everything. Kay, played expertly by recent Julliard graduate Juliana Canfield, making her professional stage debut, is a student at a boarding school African American students. When the play opens, the students are performing Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a bizarre request by the school's white founder. Soon enough, Chris, who has been helping out the bookkeeper, is drawn to Kay, and their shared love of literature and songs from Noel Coward's operetta Bitter Sweet, binds them together. The Marlowe play and Coward operetta, however, are not idle choices; both tell stories of ruin; slaughtered Huguenots in the former, failed love in the latter. If the viewer did not already guess that this interracial duo's fate would turn out badly, the references offer a subtle but decisive nudge.

The play proceeds not by intimate scenes between the two, but via their intercutting monologues, which represent their inner desires being vocalized, as well as the stories they have heard from relatives and the letters they exchange being read aloud, the contents offering clues to Harrison's ethos and the thrall he holds the community in, the town's history, including Kay's own white father, like Chris's father and grandfather a member of a prominent family; Chris's desire for escape to the north and plans for a life with Kay; the strange circumstances surrounding Kay's mother's pregnancy, illness and untimely passing; and Chris and Kay's own dreams for their future, which includes settling in Paris, where, they imagine, they will truly be free. Director Evan Yionoulis keeps the pacing swift, while also allowing for those moments where Kennedy's poetry, or Chris's singing, or President Roosevelt on the radio, needs the space and time to root and beguile.

In Kennedy's singular memoir, People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the reader learns of the veil of silence Kennedy's beautiful, mysterious mother drew around her own mother, as well as the well of melancholy and sadness that sat at the center of her heart. While He Brought Her Heart Home in a Box does not resolve the enigmas the memoir raises, it does dramatize the racial, gendered and class power dynamics and the resulting traumas that early 20th century South inflicted on its black residents, and its white ones. The local racism and racial domination, Kennedy suggests, parallels the Nazi regime in  Germany and Austria. What the play also underscores is how power marks everything. The limits Kay, as a young black woman, faces are quite different from Chris's, as is his awareness and intermittent acknowledgement of his considerable privilege, but the desire for each other and a less constrained future is one they both share. That they do not speak or sing, as each does at various points, directly to each other for most of the play is the material correlative to the social and racial divide between them, and yet they do reach each other. Determined to halt anything that contravenes local white custom and his own control of this world, Harrison Aherne finally takes the most violent step possible, in a concluding moment that erupts as only a staged work can, ending with the two main characters walking slowly backwards down a high staircase, as if a vintage, sepia 16 mm film were being run in reverse. To call it a breathtaking finale hardly does it justice.

The set, designed by Christopher Barreca, consists of two levels, one the main stage and above it, at one end, a balcony, below a wall, split by that high staircase, which leads up to a door that could be the exit from the train tracks below or a portal out of this particular hell. The wall becomes a space for projections: the black children's choir, a gun, and more. On the main stage, four chairs rim the periphery, evoking both a train station and the isolated rooms in which Kay and Chris find themselves. The high stairwell and walls doubles as a film screen, with racing train tracks filling it at various points, again signifying the distances between Kay and Chris, as well as Chris's move to New York City, and ultimately Paris. Yet the dummy version of Harrison is always hovering nearby, including at the end, preventing any real escape or changes to the landscape he has long presided over. His silent patriarchal shadow, which has menaced every word uttered, rises, by pulleys, and, devastatingly for the characters and audience, demonstrates that patriarchy, then as now, intends to have the final say.

One unexpected but curious component of the play was a beautiful scale model version of the town of Montefiore, as Chris's father would have constructed it, which sat in a hallway a level up from the main stage. I almost wished there had been a way to project images of this, in holographic form, above the play before it began and after it had concluded. (I thought I took pictures of the model, but I unaccountably forgot to.) Many thanks to my former student Darise, who alerted me to the play's run, and to my other former students Aarthi and Angela, three very talented writers whom I attended the play with. I now want to read the play in print form, and see it again. Adrienne Kennedy did not attend, so I hope TFNA taped it, and will allow it to run on TV or the internet, soon. You can find much more information about Adrienne Kennedy, including an interview with brilliant young playwright Branden Jenkins-Jacobs; critic Alicia Solomon's reading of the play; and more, here.

 The play runs through February 11, so if you are in New York, do not miss it!

De Blasio's Donors, Luxury Housing on NYCHA Land + Comics (Dante's Magic Afro)

This is a rendering of the proposed building
 at 120 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn.
Two more major de Blasio donors
have been picked for the project.
(AUFGANG ARCHITECTS)
© via New York Daily News

Yesterday brought the news that two wealthy real estate companies that were donors to New York mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign last year, where he was re-elected to his second four-year term in a landslide, received New York City approval to build luxury housing on land belonging to the underfunded New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The numerous housing projects currently run by NYCHA continue to be plagued by a host of problems, but with neither the city nor state, let alone the federal government able to find or raise funding, de Blasio has turned to private entities as a way of purportedly raising support for NYCHA's existing housing stock.

According to The New York Daily News, the new housing, to be built by developers the Arker Companies and Two Trees, is supposed to include 500--or half of its total--"half-market rate" apartments, which in practical terms means that in addition to the luxury rentals, the landlords will be able to get $3,900 (or $46,8000/year) for two-bed apartments, or half-market rate, on public land. NYCHA will lease the land, for 99 years, in return for payments to address its extensive low-income housing problems. The Daily News points out that this is the second such sweet deal involving a de Blasio donor.

In recent years, I've noted often harsh dismissals of labeling of actions like the developers' deal as neoliberalism, but this strikes me as a textbook example of it. Instead of seeking and finding government funding, via taxes, fees, etc. to support a public housing organization, the government is turning to private entities, which will benefit its lease of government subsidized, lower-cost land, to support private businesses, with some peanuts thrown back to the government in return. This is about as far from the "Sandinista" tag, with which opponents associated Blasio during his first run in 2013, as you can get.

Meanwhile, as the The Daily News article also points out:

Two de Blasio donors have said they raised money for the mayor to gain access to City Hall.

De Blasio disputes claims City Hall intervened on behalf of donor Restaurateur Harendra Singh pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe de Blasio, stating that he gave to get favorable treatment on back rent he owed for his restaurant on city-owned land.

Prosecutors said a senior aide to de Blasio arranged a meeting for Singh “in an effort to pressure the agency to make its proposed settlement terms more favorable to Singh.”

Developer Jonah Rechnitz said he spelled out to a top de Blasio aide that he was giving money to gain access. After Rechnitz paid a fine over an illegal hotel he owned, the city stopped responding to another year’s worth of complaints about the place.

The Manhattan US Attorney chose not to press pay-to-play charges against de Blasio, however. Nevertheless, according to the paper, "Prosecutor Joon Kim...made a point of stating that his investigation had determined that the mayor had intervened or directed subordinates to intervene on behalf of donors."

Here's a comic I drew around the time that de Blasio was campaigning five years ago. I often joked with C about how de Blasio's teenage son Dante's afro seemed to be a talisman, working its magic on voters (and de Blasio himself), and then played with it a bit in the frames below. It is the "afro," not Dante, who's speaking.

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE'LL ADDRESS INEQUALTY & POVERTY!

HE'LL DO SOMETHING ABOUT STOP & FRISK!

HE'LL IMPROVE SCHOOLS & RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH!

HE IS THE ONLY PROGRESSIVE WHO CAN WIN!

& HE'LL HAVE MY SPECIAL POWER TO GUIDE HIM!

More recently, during the lead-up to the 2017 mayor's race, I revisited my Magic Afro drawing. At one point the younger de Blasio, now a student at Yale University, had shaved his afro off, but as the recent campaign picked up, and during recent appearances with his father, Dante has sported that spectacular afro again. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any magic to work against neoliberalism, the real estate industry, inequality, homelessness, or any of the other ills plaguing New York City. But hey, Bill de Blasio has another four years to figure it out, no?

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

IT'S ELECTION SEASON. VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE PROGRESSIVE MAYOR OF NEW YORK

PEOPLE EVEN CLAIMED HE WAS LIKE A SANDINISTA!

HE'S BEEN THE BEST THING BIG REAL ESTATE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR!

CRIME IS DOWN, HOMELESSNESS IS UP, HYPERGENTRIFICATION RACES AHEAD. SO VOTE FOR HIM!

I'M IN NEW HAVEN BUT I CAN STILL WORK MY MAGIC DOWN IN NYC!

Happy Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

The July 10, 1966, march to City Hall
from Soldier Field.

 (Chicago Tribune
 historical photo)

Today, on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought I would post a short passage from one of Rev. King's most controversial speeches, which was the centerpiece of one of his most difficult campaigns, the Chicago Freedom Movement, in 1966. Not only did Dr. King remark on the virulence of the racism and white resistance he encountered, but at the time of his death three years later, it probably appeared to many people that the campaign had failed.

Dr. and Mrs. Coretta Scott King had visited Chicago and some of its suburban towns several times over the years, and in 1966 they even moved to Chicago to demonstrate the disparate conditions Black people were enduring under the tenure of Mayor Richard J. Daley. As part of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Dr. King urged Black voters to come out in droves and challenge the Democratic machine, controlled by Richard J. Daley. He decried white supremacy and Northern racism. He urged challenges to the Chicago power structure, better schools, housing, representation in government, everything. He also espoused Black pride and support for Black businesses, though he also criticized the nascent Black Power movement. Much like his namesake, Dr. King even presented his demands in person at City Hall, first by taping them to one of the outer doors, and then the following day in person to Mayor Daley, who was enraged by the campaign.

In the long run, despite the problems Black Chicagoans still face, things did change for the better from the status quo just over 50 years, and for lifelong and longtime Black Chicagoans now in their 70s and 80s, the changes were visible and measurable. Here are a few articles about the struggles Dr. King faced, his actions during that tough summer and year, and some of the changes that did happen. Also, I've posted an image from the speech he gave (readers can find the entire speech at the King Center's site), in which he uses the phrase "the fierce urgency of now." It is one of his memorable lines, and as applicable today as then or ever. (I'd also note that, in light of the ongoing crises Puerto Rico faces, it is notable that he mentions Puerto Ricans and the discrimination they face in Chicago in the speech's final paragraph.)

Chicago Tribune: "50 Years Ago Today: MLK Jr.'s speech at Soldier's Field, march to City Hall with demands for Daley"

Chicago Tribune: "Martin Luther King in Chicago"

WGNTV: "Web Extras: Martin Luther King and the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement"

Chicago Magazine: "The Longest March"

From Dr. King's Chicago Freedom
Movement Speech (courtesy of the King Center)

Black Lives Matter, Summer 2016: Sterling/Castile/Robinson--

Union Square, July 7, 2016
Photo © by Jack Mirkinson 

UPDATE: Tragedy begets tragedy...last night in Dallas, Texas, during a peaceful protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, a gunman or gunmen ambushed and shot five police personnel dead, and wounded 7 others. Also injured were two civilians, including a mother who was trying to shield her son from the bullets. Police officials identified the gunman, a 25-year-old African American US Army reserve member and veteran, Micah Xavier Johnson. The shooter allegedly was angered by the killing of black people and wanted to target white police officers in retribution.

After a standoff with police, they sent in a bomb squad robot, armed with an explosive device, and killed him. Police and social media had initially misidentified the gunman as an African American man who had who was openly carrying his registered weapon. (This begs the question of whether open-carry and concealed weapon laws do not apply to or for African Americans, Latinxs, and others, and only for white people.)

I mourn the deaths of these officers, and continue to grieve for the people I list below who were killed by the police or in police custody. The answer is not more violence, but an end to it all, and if that means that we have to rethink and then rebuild the very foundations of this society, built on domination, violence and oppression, then we must do it. But peacefully. And that means we have to begin by addressing one of the root problems in all of these deaths: guns, and their easy availability in the US.

On and on and on it goes. State-sanctioned police murders of black people. Veterans, lunch room workers, fathers, daughters, loved ones, people seeking medical help. Supply the category and someone searching through the roster of those slain can find a name to fit. This has occurred my entire life, in various forms, usually leading to marches and protests, calls for accountability and legal and technological changes, prosecutions of the police (which rarely happens), and occasionally, as happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, as in Miami and other cities in the past, uprisings. It is no less painful to witness, to live through today than it was when I was a child or teenager.

These last few weeks, these last few days, have filled with the names of the newly dead: Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Philando Castile in Minnesota. Angelo Brown and Stephanie Hicks in Illinois. Darius Robinson in Oklahoma. As the Guardian's statistics show, over 566 people have been killed by cops or while in police custody this year. The Huffington Post points out that 136 black people have died at the hands of cops. The highest rate in 2016, 3.4 per 1 million people, is among Native Americans, with African Americans dying at only slightly lower frequency at 3.23 per 1 million people. As horrifying as last year's numbers were, this year's should give us pause to reflect, and a charge to act.

I've written on here before about how these deaths represent a slow genocide playing out before our eyes--or some of our eyes--and how what these state-sanctioned killings, which mirror the state's brutality elsewhere in the world, underline again and again, as the Black Lives Matter movement has pointed out, is how dehumanized and disposable black people--and brown people--remain in this society, a fact that not only the Donald Trump campaign's imagery, rhetoric and surrounding discourse testify to on a regular basis, but also the toothless responses from Democrats and Republicans alike. (As BREXIT, the rise of the nationalist right in Europe, the Brazilian coup and state-sanctioned police killings there of black youth and teenagers, the fanatics in the Middle East, and so on make clear, the same could be said for the globe as a whole.)

While technology has allowed witnesses to these state killings to record and broadcast via social media imagery of what occurred, offering proof to what has too long been viewed by people not directly affected as mere anecdote or exaggeration and creating documentation, as well as a space for witness, memorialization and mourning, I also think that the subsequent hyper-circulation and replaying, as the news media often do, of the deaths can habituate and inure us to the deaths of these victims and magnify the suffering their loved ones feel, while only increasing the centuries long trauma at the core of this society. We have to look directly at what is happening, but to the extent possible, avoid turning these tragedies into spectacle. Moreover, they attest that our melancholia and fear are not groundless; it arises from the danger and blood that saturates the very ground we walk on every day. Many of us rightly fear that we are a cop's bullet or baton away from becoming a meme and statistic.

These deaths also underpin the ironic force and truth at the core of the statement that cannot be proclaimed enough, "Black Lives Matter." That this statement of affirmation has been turned inside out points to the perverse social and political logic in which we live. Like the deaths, the iconic phrase, and the movement that has arisen around it, demands that we realize and act upon the truth in the statements STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE & STOP KILLING US!

Here is a powerful poem by Jericho Brown that captures the horror and tragedy of these state-sanctioned killings and deaths in a way that only poetry can. The poem is called "Bullet Points," and I have borrowed it from Buzzfeed, where I first saw it. The copyright is Jericho's and Buzzfeed's.

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems by Langston Hughes

February 1 always marks the start of US Black History Month, as well as the birthday of one of the greatest poets this country gave the wider world, James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967). I think I've alternated in the past by celebrating one or the other, but today, in tribute to the month and to Hughes, here are a few of his poems, all taken from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad and David E. Roessel, Editors (New York: Vintage, 1995).

The first is a poem drawn from Hughes's time on the sea; Sekondi, part of Sekondi-Takoradi, is a port city in Ghana. Note the ironic play on fog and the swift punchline-like turn at the poem's end.

FOG

Singing black boatmen
An August morning
In the thick white fog at Sekondi
Coming out to take cargo
From anchored alien ships,
You do not know the fog
We strange so-civilized ones
Sail in always.

***

Here are three queer poems drawn from Hughes's collections up to 1936. I reread all the poems in these volumes in preparation for my story "Blues," which involves a (fictional?) meeting between Hughes and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, who had already translated some of Hughes' work into Spanish.

In his first three or so collections, Hughes has, among a wide array of poems in which a male voice addresses a female beloved; a female voice addresses or speaks of a male beloved; and gender-ambiguous poems, many invoke nocturnal imagery (because we all know what goes on in the dark).

SONG

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.

Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark, closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists--
And wait.

HARLEM NIGHT SONG

Come,
Let us sing the night together,
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
a band is playing
I love you.

Come, let us roam the night together
Singing.

DESIRE

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

***

Lastly, Hughes was a poet who did not shy away from political and social commentary, but he had a gift for figuring out how to express it without it (for the most part) sounding like propaganda. Part of his success hinges on his use of humor, part on his careful use of rhyme, rhetoric and rhythm, part on his inclusion of vernacular and the viewpoint of the subaltern, and part on his skillful deployment of irony. The parodic tone and collage quality here point in the direction of post-modernism.

"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" appeared in 1931 in New Masses magazine, and later in Hughes's aubiography, The Big Sea, and is considered a masterpiece of Popular Front aesthetics. I checked the Inflation Calculator, and $10,000/year in 1931 would equal $155,747.37/year in 2014 dollars. That would come to about $12,978/month, which, it turns out, was about the price of the lowest end rentals in the Waldorf Towers in 2011 (I can only imagine that it has risen by several thousand dollars as the price of high-end real estate keeps rising.) To put it another way, Hughes was prescient, and not for the first time!

Excerpt from ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE WALDORF ASTORIA

EVICTED FAMILIES

All you families put out in the street

   Apartments in the Towers are only $10,000 a year. (Three

   rooms and two baths.) Move in there until times get good,

   and you can do better. $10,000 are about the same

   to you, aren't they?

Who cares about money with a wife and kids homeless, and no-

   body in the family working? Wouldn't a duplex high above

   the street be grand, with a view of the richest city in the

   world at your nose?

"A lease, if you prefer, or an arrangement terminable at will."

All poems Copyright © Estate of Langston Hughes, 1995, 2015. All rights reserved.

Review: Empire (on Fox)

Terrence Howard and Grace Grealey
(Photo still © Chuck Hodes)

Like almost everyone we know, C and I made time to catch Empire, the new midseason drama that debuted on Fox on January 7.  Extensively ballyhooed on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, Empire is the creation of Academy Award-winning director Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, and aims, as some accounts I have read suggest, to be a fusion of Dynasty, the 1980s evening soap opera, hip hop, and King Lear. And don't forget The Sopranos. It definitely has Dynasty's melodrama and larger-than-life acting, a good deal of original hiphop in its soundtrack, and Shakespeare's three battling children (including a queer Cordelia figure), as well as the former New Jersey show's cast of semi-domesticated gangsters, but whether it all works together--though it most definitively is the work of Lee Daniels, as anyone standing in the next room overhearing could tell without much effort--is another matter.

Empire tells the story of music mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), who has raised his three sons Andre (Trai Byers), Jamal (Jussie Smollett) and Hakeem (Bryshere Gray) by himself as his ex-wife Cookie (Taraji P. Henson in an every-scene-stealing performance) has served time for a drug conviction, though when the series starts, she's just been released, of course without anyone else's foreknowledge. It's unclear how old Lucious is supposed to be--yes, black don't crack but the man doesn't appear a year over 45, even though his eldest son could be nearing 30 (it is biologically possible, I know)--but he is thinking about his eponymous empire, which he is about to take public, and about his potential successors. By the end of the pilot episode, he also receives health news that will eventually take him off the show (unless it turns out to be a misdiagnosis; the writers have written themselves in a bit of a corner with this one). He also commits a mortal crime (I don't mean the hair), but it's so clumsily handled that it can only lead to serious problems.

In Lear fashion, the sons don't exactly delight in each others' time. Andre, the eldest and CFO of Lyon Entertainment, feels he doesn't get enough respect from his father because of his lack of musical ability, suffers from bipolar disorder (I'm almost cringing to see how this is depicted), and is married to his white college sweetheart, Rhonda. Jamal, who possesses enough music skills to make Prince jealous, is openly gay, anti-corporate, estranged from his father--who, in a scene taken from Daniels' life but nevertheless horrifying, throws the child in a trashcan (!) when he appears in drag during a family party--and lives with his Latino boyfriend, Michael (Rafael de la Fuente). Hakeem, who struck me as the least well drawn character so far, parties too much, loves older woman (Macy Gray, Naomi Campbell, etc.) and holds deep hostility towards his mother for having abandoned him (prison, remember). He would send the "Empire" down the drain if left with it for too long.

Bryshere Gray and Jussie Smollett
(Photo still © Chuck Hodes)

That leaves Cookie, who blows out of prison like a tornado and heads first to see her children, to reconnect with them if not exactly to make amends. She wants to manage Jamal. She wants respect from Hakeem, whom she beats with a broom (!) to show him she still Mama and boss. (Cookie don't play that....) She wants her piece of the company. She wants to head the company's AR division. She...well, fill in the blank. Henson is a talented actress, with a capacity for small-scale to megadrama-style acting, and so it was no surprise that once she made her appearance, especially in this role, she would turn things out. One problem with her scenes, though, is that it's not clear Daniels has found the right surrounding frame for her yet, throwing everything off and rendering the proceedings a bit cartoonish. The general tinniness of the dialogue--though there are some great moments--does not help. 

Other characters include Grace Grealey as Anika Calhoun, Lucious's lover and head of Empire Entertainment's AR division and thus Cookie's rival; Malik Yoba as Vernon Turner, a longtime friend of Lucious' and chairman of the company; and Antoine McKay as Bunkie Campbell, a longtime homeboy of Lucious and Cookie from back in the day who ends up paying a serious price for speaking up for himself. Also filling out the cast is actress Gabouré Sidibe, with blond highlights no less, playing Becky, Lucious' assistant. None of these characters was especially compelling, though something tells me that in addition to Bunkie's seeming demise, we may witness some of these other characters taken out or with their hands on a trigger of some sort. I sincerely hope Yoba gets to do more than sit and take insults, and that Sidibe isn't racing breathlessly behind Howard in future episode.

The show raises lots of questions, including whether focusing on a faltering industry, and in this way, is the right setting for a 2015 series; were this show set in 1990 (or had it been made then), it might have resonated much more in every way, but today while there are still music companies, both indies, semi-independents and those fully attached the conglomerates, we can see a cavalcade of their members and participants with minimal varnish and maximum drama on Real Housewives of Atlanta or Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, New York or LA. Are the technical aspects of music-making that this series features anachronistic today? Indeed, the entire landscape of music as an enterprise, along with related industries like music journalism, music TV, etc., has been transformed. Other than Henson's or Smollett's characters, was anyone on the show half as interesting or compelling as Stevie J and Joseline, Li'l Scrappy, Erica Mena and Sin, Joe Buddens and Tahiry, Peter and Amina Buttafly, or Ray J and anyone else on that LA mess factory?

Taraji P. Henson and Terrance Howard
(Photo still © Chuck Hodes)

That the show traffics in stereotypes also rankled, but I know that drawing with broad and familiar strokes is Daniels' purview, and seeking too much subtlety probably was asking too much. Nevertheless, given the paucity of shows about contemporary Black life, anyone traveling this road should make the best effort possible. Respectability isn't the answer, but neither is a lack of complexity. But we will see. The treatment of homophobia, also played into stereotypes. A harshly homophobic Black father isn't such a stretch, of course; I've lived that scenario myself. But did Cookie have to refer to her son as a "queen" and his boyfriend using a feminine pronoun? It was a positive step that the boyfriend ended up being Latino (and we learned that an earlier one had had dreadlocks, if I heard correctly), so the gay = white equation didn't hold. But I will be interested to see how the series plays with Jamal's character, and whether in the interests of pleasing the broad audience, homonormativity becomes Jamal's norm. As is, he's refreshingly distinctive as TV show portrayals go.

One last question that I could not stop asking was: WHY is Terrance Howard running around with a conk? I kept trying to think of figures he might be based on, but since the show is set after 1965, I confess to bafflement. I could even see an old head with 1) a high-top fade--late 80s still and forever, 2) a fro, 3) a Jheri curl, 4) even dreadlocks or a Quo Vadis, but that pressed hair seems straight out of someone mistaken fantasy. His clothing choices also seemed off, as did Hakeem's, but that could just my finickiness. That said, all the houses, cars, and bling do seem appropriate, so perhaps a bit of recalibration can get the show to where it needs to be. But this is just my opinion; it turns out, unsurprisingly, that a good portion of viewers are starved for representations of anything involving Black people or other people of color, and Empire's first night ratings were through the roof. I enjoy watching beautiful people, especially black people, doing their thing, as well as a good soap opera, so I will be tuning into Empire next week too.

"No Angel" (Poem for Michael Brown)

Though the motivation often arises in me, especially when certain types of major events occur, I seldom am able to write immediate occasional or topical poems. Today after reading New York Times African American (!?) reporter John Eligon's piece "Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Problems and Promise," however, in which he includes the following paragraph--

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

--and in particular, the unnecessary and noxious "Michael Brown...was no angel," subjectively singling out this teenager, whose life was tragically cut short when he was shot dead by policeman Darren Wilson in cold blood, in a way I have almost never see or read for any other major public figures with any life issues, including long histories of drug use, criminal activity, and worse, I became enraged. Yet rather than just stifling or sublimating it (and Eligon's piece provoked a brouhaha, including considerable backlash, all across social and traditional media), I stopped what I was doing at the New York Public Library and wrote out a poem directly on Twitter, titled "No Angel."

Since not all of J's Theater's readers are on Twitter, I am sharing the poem here, edited and with an additional stanza). It is a tribute in and of the moment, to Brown, but I think it works on its own, and the relationships between and among the chain of metaphors and metonyms, as well as the ironies contained within, should be clear enough. To his memory and many others in his situation: RIP.

"NO ANGEL"

No angel?
no god?
no cherub?
no seraph?

no saint?
no deity?
no divinity?
no lord?

no king?
no prince?
no noble?
no peer?

no master?
no idol?
no leader?
no icon?

no star?
no notable?
no hero?
no worthy?

no baby?
no toddler?
no youngster?
no boy?

no brother?
no nephew?
no uncle?
no son?

no ally?
no buddy?
no sidekick?
no friend?

no somebody?
no character?
no nobody?
no fellow?

no being?
no soul?
no mortal?
no individual?

no man?
no person?
no sovereign?
no human?

RIP Michael Brown
© 2014

Copyright © John Keene, 2014. All rights reserved.

Word for Word Lunch Poems at Bryant Park + Jeffery Renard Allen at Powerhouse

Among the many treasures New York City offers year-round is the weekly Word for Word series at the outdoor Bryant Park Reading Room, right behind the New York Public Library's Schwarzman Research Branch. Organized by Paul Romero, the poetry readings occur on Tuesdays (and some Wednesdays) in the evening and Thursdays at lunch time from January through the late fall, , except on major holidays, and feature a diverse range of readers. This year's lunchtime readings have been organized around specific presses and poetry organizations and groups, so poets published by Coffee House Press, Song Cave Press, WordTech Communications, and affiliated with CUNY and Blue Flower Arts have read so far.

Yesterday, as part of a summer-long tribute to the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Frank O'Hara's (1926-1966) legendary Lunch Poems (City Lights Books), Patricia Spears Jones invited four fellow poets to read poems inspired by O'Hara book and work, and one of his central figures and themes, New York City. Poets Lydia Cortes, Sharan Strange, Jocelyn Lieu, and Jessica Greenbaum, as well as Patricia, each read a poem by O'Hara--including some of my favorites, like "A Step Away from Them" and "Steps"--followed by their own. O'Hara's casual tone, his engagement with the everyday, his often breezy treatment of desire and love, his incisive humor, and his urbanity, all surfaced in the poems of each poet. 

Cortes read several poems that dealt with her Puerto Rican heritage; Strange also explored city life, including a poem that mentioned another poet who was present, Thomas Sayers Ellis, snapping photos throughout, and ended with an unforgettable tribute to her mother; Lieu read a series of "Hard Times Haikus" that weren't exactly haikus but distilled experience, with concision and wit, as effectively as that form can; Jessica Greenbaum invoked Florence Nightingale; and Patricia, accompanied by rain, and then by an umbrella-bearing Paul Romero, brought Paris, philosophers, Ellis (again), curses, and Freedom Summer into the mix. Though I headed off to lunch with another poet friend who attended the reading, the poems, O'Hara's and everyone elses, were satisfyingly filling all by themselves.

Lydia Cortes

Jessica Greenbaum

Jocelyn Lieu

Sharan Strange

Paul Romero, and Patricia Spears Jones

***

Later that evening, at the Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn, poet, fiction writer and professor Jeffery Renard Allen read from his acclaimed new novel The Song of the Shank, which fictionalizes the life of Thomas Green "Blind Tom" Wiggins (1849-1908), a 19th century enslaved African American whose piano performances were legendary in their day. Jeff began the reading by talking how an Oliver Sacks article he read years first hipped him to Blind Tom's story; he noted his particular fascination with Sacks's discussion of the "autistic sublime," which he attempted to depict in his text. Other aspects of Blind Tom's life, such as his performances on behalf of the Confederacy, and his refusal, after a certain point, to perform, required a complex rendering that Jeff, as the author, had to negotiate.

He then described how he transformed Wiggins's troubling story into a novel, which took him a decade to write and which involved several false starts. His ultimate discovery entailed eliding certain historical specificities, staying aslant of Blind Tom's interiority, pushing the boundaries of realism, and taking a few other authorial liberties to bring the story to life. He also learned a few things he did not know before, such as that "the blind can cry." (I didn't know this either, but I won't forget it.) Although there are no recordings of Blind Tom's music, a Brooklyn-based performer, John Davis, has reconstructed some of them, but Allen relied primarily on his imagination. The stellar reviews he has received so far strongly affirm his approach.

After Jeff finished reading and answering questions, performer Genovis Albright accompanied him, performing one of Blind Tom's infamous tunes, "The Battle of Manassas," which sounded a lot like "Dixie." One of Blind Tom's performance techniques was to play multiple tunes--sometimes three at once--simultaneously, and Albright appeared to do this briefly, which immediately brought to mind the music of Charles Ives. I asked Albright about this, specifically mentioning his symphonies, but he wasn't sure what I meant, and afterwards I sent Jeff a note thanking him for the reading but also rhetorically wondering whether any Ives scholars had investigated whether he heard Blind Tom's performances. Given that both may have lived in and around New York at the same time, it would not be inconceivable, would it? Jeff's reading deeply sparked my interest, and The Song of the Shank is at the top of my list of summer reads.

Jeffery Renard Allen

Genovis Albright

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from "The Impasse in Racial Relations," from The Trumpet of Conscience, San Francisco: Harper & Row, Co., 1968.

Update: You can listen a newly released audio version of an address Rev. Dr. King Jr. gave in 1962 to the New York State Civil War Centennial Commission at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City. He spoke to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (issued on January 1, 1863), enumerating the history of human rights in the US, and criticizing the nation for not living up the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln's proclamation. The New York State Museum has now made the address available.

"My Soul Is Weary With Sorrow"

Trayvon Martin, 1995-2012

"My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to your word." Psalm 119:28

Shortly before we learned last night of the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, C said to me, he's going to be convicted, and I said he would be found not guilty of the February 26, 2012 killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Any number of clues during the trial's run pointed in this direction, but I also thought at that moment of the innumerable times over the span of my life on this earth, of the innumerable times over the nearly 400 years of colonial and US history, during which black and brown people have been killed, with impunity, which is to say, with the support of the state and its various systems, including the law.

I thought about how the killing of black and brown people is a feature of the creation and history of this state, and many others, including our and their laws.

I thought about how we live in a society and in a system in which the concept of justice is often a phantasm, a mere word, often made to function as its inverse, especially when it comes to black and brown people.

I thought about how for so many of us, Trayvon Martin was not and will not be just a name, not just an image, not just an analogy or a metonym, but a young person, a young black person, a young black murdered person whose name we add to a long list of names, too long, that we know we must not and cannot forget.

I thought about how many of us can say that we have been in Trayvon Martin's place and by the grace of God, of luck, of circumstance, we are still able to talk about God or gods, and grace, and circumstance, we are able to talk about the fact that we are still here, but very might not have been.

I thought about Trayvon Martin's parents' grief and sorrow, about how they will never get their son back, how they will never be able to live down the horror not only seeing his body after he was killed but now know that it has become an object of derision, of merriment, for people who had no concept of his humanity and perhaps never will.

I thought about how our friends did not have to testify in court and suffer the humiliation of becoming the subject, the target of attacks, a figure for caricature, a way for people not to deal with the terrific tragedy that unfolded that night in Florida.

I thought about how we have witnessed this story over and over again, about how angry and disappointed and enraged and disgusted and numbed I and others are by it, how it always gets transformed into another story, a story in which the deeper social, political and economic structures that make possible the killing of black children, brown children, black people, brown people, poor people, queer people, women, never get examined or discussed, and people move on to the next thing, and then it happens all over again.

I thought about how this entire fiasco will be turned into a money-making enterprise, how death, especially black and brown deaths, become a spectacle, to be exploited and disposed of when the next new thing comes along, and the fact of this child's death, the seriousness and sadness and solemnity that should attend it, are quickly disposed of.

I thought about how, once again, nothing will change unless we change that nothing into something, how we cannot depend upon "leaders" or laws to ensure the safety and sanctity of our laws, unless they are fully grasp how unsafe and little regarded, we are and are tired of being.

I thought about how low-grade mourning, and frustration, and rage, and indifference, become constants, and how so many of our lives entails not just recognition of but a continuous attempt to manage these feelings, to not be consumed by, destroyed by them.

We cannot be consumed and destroyed by these feelings. We should mourn Trayvon Martin's death, and change a legal system that allows his killer to walk free. But we also have to acknowledge that the society we live in needs to change, and not rest until that happens.

Jason Collins Comes Out

Jason Collins (© Kwaku Alston/Sports Illustrated)

I continue to be tremendously impressed and moved by the courage of Jason Collins, a current NBA journeyman center and free agent, who announced yesterday in an article ins Sports Illustrated's current (May 6, 2013) online issue, "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay." With those words, he became and now is the "the first openly gay" male athlete playing in a major American male team sport. There have been a number of male and female athletes in individual sports--from Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King in tennis, to Greg Louganis in diving, and lesbians, bi and trans women athletes in team sports, as well as male athletes in pro sports overseas who have come out. In addition, Sheryl Swoopes and most recently Brittany Griner, in the WNBA, are among the black gay American women who have come out playing for major American team sports. But Jason Collins represents a double first--the first man, and the first black American man, to come out while still active as a player for a major American pro team. He finished this season with the Washington Wizards, after beginning it with the Boston Celtics, and has also played for the former New Jersey Nets, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Atlanta Hawks. Though he makes clear in the article that he did not set out to be the first, he has instantly become a trailblazer with this amazing step, and he deserves the highest praise for taking it.

Collins's eloquent Sports Illustrated testament goes beyond just coming out, exploring his journey to those opening lines. So much of what he describes--the fear, the anxiety, the despair, the pain, the ambivalence, the self-delusion, the almost crushing desire to be accepted, to fit it, to not be any more different--are things many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people have felt and still feel, sometimes after being out and living openly; coming out is and remains a process, and is never a final act, though that first step out, even today at a moment of fast-moving social progress and ever-expanding acceptance, at least among many in this country, of lgbtiq people, can often be the most difficult one, and for someone in Collins's position--a man of color, a professional athlete, a person raised in a Christian home, someone raised with black middle-class aspiration values--it probably did feel as difficult and risky as he describes. I am not a professional athlete, but many of the feelings he expresses are ones I and many people I know have felt intimately, deeply. Collins describes his journey in a way that welcomes all readers in, to understand what he has gone through, and where he hopes to go next with his life. It is a narrative of personal liberation, but it will probably have resonance in ways Collins has not ever imagined.

Many commentators online have noted how valuable Collins's comments will be for young people struggling with their sexual orientation, and I agree wholeheartedly with this. For young people of color, Collins, Brittany Griner, and many other out public figures probably will play a crucial role in self-acceptance. Seeing someone like themselves who is able to say "I am gay," who does not fall into the usual mainstream representations of queerness, will probably be invaluable. There are already many people who fit this category, but male professional team sport athlete was not one of them. Collins' coming out may also help people his own age and older who are grappling with their sexualities, and may help many heterosexual people who may still not accept and embrace lgbtiq people in part based on stereotypes, or who may still be carrying around abstracted ideas about who is lgbtiq. It may helped parents, grandparents, siblings--like Jason's twin brother, Jarron, who is straight--relatives, neighbors, all kinds of people who still have not been able to fully see the lgbtiq people around them, to see their humanity. Many of Collins's peers in the NBA like Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Dwyane Wade, Emeka Okafor, Al Horford, Jerry Stackhouse, Metta World Peace, and Baron Davis, past NBA legends like Karl Malone and Magic Johnson, stars in other sports like pioneer Martina Navratilova and , as well as other prominent figures across the society, including President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Collins's former Stanford roommate Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III, and Oprah Winfrey, have all shown their support.

Collins's coming out may prove especially valuable to other male and female athletes who are not yet ready to come out or be out, to live openly publicly (though they may be out to those close to them), and have felt the same sort of pressures of heteronormativity and heterosexism, who because of homophobia believe they have to choose a spouse of the opposite sex and go through the motions of a relationship or a marriage, who have felt despair and because they don't see a single person like them willing and able to be out doing what they do, they feel they cannot be honest even to themselves. This is as true for white male professional team sport athletes as it is for black, latino, asian-american, native american, hapa, and other male professional team sport athletes. Jason Collins has opened that door, and walked through it, joining a number of amazing athletes, like John Amaechi, Kwame Harris, Esera Tuaolo, Roy Simmons, Dave Kopay, and others, who came out after ending their professional careers. It's unclear if any team will sign Collins, but given his talent, skills and determination, for the sheer sake of business, an NBA team would be foolish to pass him up. This doesn't mean there won't still be a bit of a freakshow, that homophobes won't rear their heads, that he won't meet with some rejection or indifference by teammates. I imagine he realizes this; we all do. Some of this backlash began almost as soon as the article and news broke. But he has opened the door, in a different but still significant way as predecessors like Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood did, and others, perhaps a small, single-file line, in the NBA, the NFL, the MLB, the NHL, and the MLS, will walk through, but even a few in one or several will be significant. So I cheer Jason Collins, and appreciate what he has done. I hope has the support he needs, and that all who follow him will be able to find and rely upon it as well.