Juneteenth Evening OT – Apropos of Nothing in Particular

Congratulations to this year's grads, especially to those who marked their ceremonies with protest. Don't care what the powers that be have to say about it. It's fucking American. I asked my kids to say "Congraduations!" to their classmates as a joke. Talk about protestations! "It's not funny and I'll sound like an idiot," said the older, and younger concurred. They're not wrong. 

Antioch College, est. 1854, Yellow Springs, OH. Virginia Hamilton attended Antioch before transferring to OSU. She was born in Yellow Springs, and readers familiar with the area surrounding Antioch will recognize the town and school in The House of Dies Drear, even though they're not named in the book. Thomas Small's father teaches in one of the towers where they find one of the mysterious triangles.

Here's a short list of notable US firsts. Notable mostly for how long it took. Did you know Harvard was established in 1636? Now you do. All the links are from wikipedia:

John Chavis, a free Black man and soldier of the Revolutionary War, enrolled at Liberty Hall Academy (later Washington and Lee University) in 1795. Some accounts say he graduated in 1799, others are not so certain. At the very least, he was the first Black person to enroll in college in the US. And perhaps to graduate.

The amazingly named Alexander Lucius Twilight, the first Black man elected to a state legislature (VT), graduated from Middlebury College in 1823, the first Black man to receive a bachelor's degree in the US. Born free.

Lucy Stanton Day Sessions was the first Black woman to complete a four-year college course. Oberlin, 1850. Abolitionist. Born free. Do you sense a pattern? Also a fascinating name.

Richard Theodore Greener, born free in Philadelphia, became Harvard's first Black graduate in 1870. Finally. 234 years later at one of the most overpriced and overrated schools. Professor at Howard and US diplomat to India.

One of the Seven Sisters, Radcliffe College graduated its first Black woman, Alberta Virginia Scott, in 1898. She died of hardship at twenty-six.

Speculative fiction writer W. E. B. Du Bois was the first Black person to receive a PhD from Harvard. I'm only half-joking about the "speculative fiction" part. Scholar, historian, radical. Sure. But he wrote science fiction and horror stories too. I've read a few of them and they're pretty good. His biography of John Brown is also good. Blood and thunder and passages from Revelations. It works, even if it's not considered rigorous by historians' standards. There's a lot of bio on him, as well there should be.

After decades of abuse by his own government (FBI, McCarthy) and his own colleagues in the NAACP, he became a citizen of Ghana after visiting there in 1961, and the US wouldn't renew his visa a few years later. A dirty trick. Sort of a shrug and I'm sick of this shit. I used the picture above because my brain still can't accept he died as recently as 1963. Lots of wars, hot and cold. I wonder what he thought of the Beatles and Stones?

Du Bois came to mind due to the news that Stevie Wonder became a citizen of Ghana on his birthday last month. He's sick of this country's bullshit too. He said so. I considered posting Please Don't Go, but that's a love song. Instead I'll go with a song with a groove from back when he still had hope for the US: