Tag Archives: fugitive slave act

(Original air date: July 30, 2019) Forget the haters – they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans. You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing …

In the August 1897 Atlantic Monthly W. E. B. Du Bois published “Strivings of the Negro People” in which he introduced the term double-consciousness: …this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — …

In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, …