The sixty-first anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Civil Rights milestone.

An American major league sport saw its first integration seven years before legal segregation was overturned in American public schools.



Rachel Robinson's interview on education and The Jackie Robinson Foundation.

Guest speaker Prof. Pellom McDaniels' speech at the Negro League Museum's celebration.

Mike Bauman calls for a national Holiday.

MLB's coverage and page o'links.


It's great that MLB is making JRD an annual observation. It would be even better if the date was given its proper due in mainstream American history.

Really beats bitching about income taxes.

Witness my complete failure to update in a regular fashion. Wow - a month? D-, self.

I'll just bring the random, then.

- brownbetty has a great post here about the latest on the Jena Six. It should be read and spread far and wide.

- Loved Blink so much. Creepy and twisty and clever. Joining the Moffat fangirling now.

- Happy to see BBC-AM isn't gutting the Gay out of Torchwood. Still love my cheesy, cracky, pterodactyl in the office show.

- I have my first new pair of Converse in a decade. They have flames. Shoes met with a mixture of headshaking and snickering. All ya all can bite me. Chucks are classic! And it's not like you weren't well aware of my inability to dress myself. I've been wearing nothing but 501s since God invented the button-fly.

- My dog seems to have developed an interest in the new lady dog in the neighborhood. She's a pretty, young rottweiler. He's... a chihuahua. I don't see it working out the way he hopes.

- Rewatching my old World Series dvd, and the '68 chapter still gets me teary. I want it to be required viewing for all the newer Tigers' fans. See? This is how we do it - pull something fantastic outta nowhere when you've abandoned all hope. No, we're not going to the WS this October - Detroit only does that every two decades. Our ballclub is 106 years old and this is how we roll. Kick back, enjoy the *whole* season, and wait for 2026.

And be happy we're not still sporting the circa 1980 Away uniforms.

- Stevie Wonder has a new album in the works, hopefully released on his Mother's birthday in January, including covers of some of her favorites. What could be better than that?

He's always been able to hit my tiny bulletproof Romantic target dead on.

So I'll leave you with 'Uptight' mixed with the Clash.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/8sohsi

Does the name Willie Horton mean anything to you?

It does to me. It means a lot.

It may mean a particular Presidential campaign ad.

It may mean the derailment of Dukakis' presidential bid, or the beginning of the first round of Bush years. A watershed low in political ads. It played to racism, conscious and otherwise. It was built to fear-monger, and it was very effective.

The name itself became loaded with ugliness, a weapon, a threat. Those two words became a political hand grenade. And I hated that for an additional reason, a personal reason.

I'm not an educated or articulate person. I'm not much good at reasoned debate. I can't speak to being a POC.

But I can tell you about Willie Horton.

Because I'm a baseball fan who grew up in Detroit. Willie Horton wore #23, Willie the Wonder, he was my first Tiger. Having a Tiger is like having an OTP. Your Tiger kind of... chooses you. You don't pour over the stats and go with the best numbers. It's not rational, it just sort of hits you. First love, baseball style.

I don't remember seeing him play my first game at Tiger Stadium. I was four. It was the summer after the [12th Street] riots, the year we won the World Series.

I'm not even going to bring the eyeglazing stats that baseball fans live for. Just some basics from the blurb on his biography-


From The People's Champion by Kevin Allen

At 15, Willie Horton received his first contract offer to become
a professional baseball player. At 16, Horton walloped
a pitch into the light tower standard above the third deck at
Tiger Stadium during the Public School League championship
game. At 17, he was a boxing champion. At 20, he
smacked his first major league home run off Robin Roberts.

At 24, Horton stood, fully uniformed, on the hood of his car,
in the midst of burning homes, overturned cars and ransacked
businesses, and pleaded for an end to the violence of
the 1967 riots.

At 25, he led his hometown Detroit Tigers to
its first World Series title in almost a quarter of a century.

It's that second paragraph.

In the middle one of the deadliest riots in US history, with the National Guard rolling tanks into neighborhoods and folks dying in the streets, the man got up on top of his car and did what he thought he could in an impossible situation. Maybe that doesn't seem like much to you. It touches me. Everyday heroics, from someone in a position to avoid the whole situation. Because it was his city in that mess.

Those were unimaginable days, forty years ago this July, from what I know from people who remember. People hid in their homes, fought in the streets, some ran and never looked back. These are people who died. 33 of them black, 10 of them not. That number has been disputed by pretty much everyone I grew up with. They put the number of dead in the hundreds.

I really don't know if I can express what that World Series win the following summer did for my city. I can tell you Willie Horton is credited with making the assist that saved the series.


This is Mr. Horton, at the dedication of his memorial at Northwestern, his old high school -




I hope the next time you hear the name, maybe you'll remember this too.

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I don't really know if this qualifies as an IBARW entry - It's not deep, it's fully fannish, and it barely touches on the fact that exploitive racist attitudes and fears behind that ad are what made the whole thing possible. Don't know if I've made the connection that ugly race-based tactics using one black man besmirtched another. It doesn't address the man used to win an election.

And it really doesn't begin to touch the riots, the conditions that led to them, and what they left behind.

I love my hometown. I love my ballclub.

And I'm pleased that Google pulls up my childhood hero as the first hit for the name.

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