The Civil Wars

Although this is NOT my favorite American History topic, “The Civil Wars” is quickly becoming one of my favorite groups.

Check out this song that’s been on Grey’s Anatomy. I discovered them on PASTE. I also like how the lead singer kinda looks like Johnny Depp…

@WendellPierce

Check out Wendell Pierce on Twitter. He’s “Bunk” from The Wire.

He’s got provocative things to say about The Help from an African-American perspective.

@WendellPierceWendell Pierce

The movie The Help was painful to watch. This passive segregation lite was hurtful. I kept thinking of my grandmother who was The Help

@WendellPierceWendell Pierce

I never knew my mother had raised white children until we saw this movie.I was shocked.She was hurt by the film.She thought it was an insult

@WendellPierceWendell Pierce

The story was a sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history that is Jim Crow light.

@WendellPierceWendell Pierce

We never tell their stories alone. In Hollywood a black woman’s story has to be coupled with a white person’s story to validate it.

I can almost hear him saying, “Ya happy now, bitch?” 

The last comment is the most compelling to me. Are movies into “black” and “white”? Do white people go see Tyler Perry movies? Are white people only interested in The Help because it is from the voice of a white woman?

I can’t wait to see this movie. Is it better to read up on it beforehand, or allow myself to go into the movie untainted and try to form my own opinion. It’s a little late for that now…

This day in history…1861

…Georgia voted to secede from the Union. Check out this NPR broadcast that woke me up this morning. Contrary to popular belief, there was much dispute over secession in our state. Most interesting to me is Alexander Stephens’ 1861 speech attempting to persuade Georgians to cooperate rather than fight the north. It also sheds light on the centrality of the issue of slavery to the war. He later became the Vice President of the Confederacy.

ATLANTA, GA (WABE) – Today is January 19th, and if we were to turn Georgia’s clock back 150 years to this date in 1861, we’d find delegates at a state convention in Milledgeville voting to leave the Union. Here, Georgia State University historian Cliff Kuhn talks with WABE’s Steve Goss… © Copyright 2011, WABE

What is the purpose of history?

“Children, I always taught you that history has its uses, its serious purpose. I always taught you to accept the burden of our need to ask why. I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once defined it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.

So that it teaches us no short-cuts to Salvation, no recipe for a New World, only the dogged and patient art of making do. I taught you that by forever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.

Yes, yes, the past gets in the way; it trips us up, bogs us down; it complicates, makes difficult.

But to ignore this is folly, because, above all, what history teaches us is to avoid illusion and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder-workings, pie-in-the-sky—to be realistic.”

Graham Swift, Waterland
(1983), pp.93-94. Volume XIV, No.5 Page 5