History

August 12, 1973 I saw Orlando Cepeda go 5 for 5 in a Red Sox rout of the California Angels in Fenway Park. I was 15 and dad took me to the game while we (mom, dad, Robin and me) were on our way to my only trip to Ireland. I remember the game, but not that it was just dad and me that went. But that's what it says in mom's scrapbook from the trip (attached). Dad liked sports OK, but I'm sure attending this game was a gesture to me.

This. Because American Apartheid is not ancient history. This is America. Still. Segregation may not be law anymore, but it's not just a ghost neither.

How many American neighborhoods, schools, and churches today are nearly entirely segregated? Is yours? Or is it just theirs?

I asked, when I lived in Alabama, why the churches were entirely segregated. A young woman told me in all sincerity "why would they want to come to our chutches, they got chutches of their own". I no longer live in Alabama.

Take your time to view the images and read the context.

Dad was a great admirer of Mencken and I was recently inspired to look up this interview with the man, made on June 30, 1948 a few months before Mencken died:

Below is an account of one of the Spanish expeditions of the New World in the early 16th century, and one of the most amazing tales of human audacity and perceverience I've seen.

The expedition leaves Spain in 1527 with about 600 men. About 300 of them landed on the Gulf coast of Florida, around the location of modern Tampa Bay. They intentionally sent their fleet away, marched overland to around modern Tallahassee, suffered huge losses, built rafts in part by making nails from their armor. A few men made it to the coast of modern Texas, possibly near modern Galveston, and struck…