P: Of his time, of his place.

[Allan Balliett]

Mark, thanks for pointing out this important connection. Here I have to
ignore that wonderful P Moon and concentrate on your finger.

I, too, am reading Maclean's important pre-history of the coming Pence
govenrment

I've been very disturbed by discovering just how horrible the state of
Virginia was in discriminating against minorities. (And horrified to
realize the roots of charter schools and voucher systems) Here's an example
of how without conscience they were, from the governor's office down
through the state government

“Virginia had become a defendant in one of the five cases folded into Brown
v. Board of Education owing to the determination of one teenager who had
had enough. Tired of taking classes in “tar paper shacks” in an overcrowded
“hand-me-down” high school in Prince Edward County, one of the state’s
former plantation communities, Barbara Rose Johns led a two-week-long
strike by her fellow high school students—some 450 in all—to demand a
better school. The niece of the Reverend Vernon Johns, the radical minister
who later mentored the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Johns never
consulted her Montgomery uncle about the strike she was planning.1

Instead, the studious girl with sparkling eyes and a luminous smile looked
to her favorite“teacher, Miss Inez Davenport. The students in Miss
Davenport’s afternoon class regularly complained that “it wasn’t fair” that
they attended classes in jury-rigged structures without indoor plumbing
that passersby imagined to be chicken coops. Students contended with leaky
roofs, woodstoves, rickety furnishings, and cast-off textbooks from white
schools. The white students attended a new high school, replete with
science labs, indoor plumbing, steam heat, and a well-stocked library and
gym.<snip>

On Virginia's poll tax: "it was one of the states that also made that tax
cumulative, so that if, say, two elections had not featured candidates who
interested you but the third one did, you would have to pay all three
years’ taxes to vote. In areas like Prince Edward County, which had large
numbers of impoverished black farmworkers, the poll tax had proven an
effective way to keep them from influencing policy. So the parents had to
beg. And county leaders were not persuaded that black students’ education
merited raising more money.4
<This one 'kills' me> In self-justification, the officials “would always
talk about the Negro tax contribution being so low,” only about one-tenth
of the county’s total revenue from property taxes, said M. Boyd Jones,
Moton’s principal. “They expected us to raise our incomes without improving
education.”  A better black high school would require either tax increases
or a bond issue, neither of which white voters would support, because their
children were well provided for in their own schools. Anyway, officials
reasoned, why do more for “colored kids” capable only of work in the
fields, kitchens, or factories?6 The white folks making these judgments
sought no understanding of the[snip]”

Excerpt From: Nancy MacLean. “Democracy in Chains.” iBooks.

On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 5:56 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is 1958 in Virginia.
>
> There is state legislation to
> privatize all education---at a time when the word 'privatize'
> was not even in use--so that Brown vs. Board of Education can be
> worked around.
>
> In July, the Governor has declared all public
> schools will be closed come September so that the private schools
> can take hold, take over. (in 1956 a state law had been passed allowing
> the closing
> of any public school which was going to admit black students).
>
> But parents, both/all races, resisted more than they accepted.
>
> In Norfolk, where more than 10,000 white youth found themselves shut out
> of high school,
> became the site of the most avid organizing by parents, students and
> teachers..
>
> "Here in Virginia's most cosmopolitan and racially moderate city...owing
> in no small part
> to the large US Navy presence, public school educators refused to
> cooperate with
> the privatization campaign. As an alternative, they provided tutoring to
> 4,000 students,
> reaching less than half of the shut-out youth, but sixteen times more than
> those who
> enrolled in the segregation academy."
>                                                    ----Nancy MacLean,
> Democracy in Chains, 2017
>
> "The Secret Integration" was published in *The Saturday Evening Post *in
> 1964.
> The only story Thomas P himself still mostly respected by 1984.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170714/e9cab27a/attachment.html>