"A Better Ex-President Than President"

"Businessman, Navy officer, evangelist, politician, negotiator, author, woodworker, citizen of the world--Carter forged a path that still challenges political assumptions and stands out among the 45 men who reached the nation's highest office. The 39th president leveraged his ambition with a keen intellect, deep religious faith and prodigious work ethic, conducting diplomatic missions into his 80s and building houses for the poor well into his 90s."

Bill Barrow of the Associated Press reports the death of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

Jos Joseph at The Hill writes that "Jimmy Carter was the Christian most politicians pretend to be."

Lindsay M. Chervinsky at The Bulwark adds that "Jimmy Carter redefined his legacy after his presidency."

But Jonathan Schlefer at The Nation contends that by "[t]urning sharply toward neoliberalism (before that term was commonplace) and weaponizing markets, [Carter] set the US economy on its path toward lousy working-class wages and steeper financial crises."

"Report: Many States Still Relying On Outdated Methods To Disenfranchise Voters"

"At press time, Larson cautioned that many of these antiquated methods were rife for human error and could result in thousands of minorities being allowed to vote."

From The Onion.

Balls and Strikes

"In his opinion hobbling preclearance, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the 15th Amendment, which protects racial minorities' right to vote, 'is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.' But Section 5 did not 'punish for the past'; it used the past to determine where racial voter suppression was most likely to occur in the future. The catastrophic consequences of Shelby County suggest Section 5's forecasts were accurate. And thanks to Roberts' handiwork, the residents of Randolph County are confronting a future in which their right to vote has been quietly nullified."

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate writes that "[f]ive years later, the consequences of the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act are painfully clear."

"It Was the Angriest I Have Ever Been in My Life"

"'I refused to go to the back of the bus,' but 'the teacher pleaded with me. She said it would be advisable.' Eventually, with passengers looking on and the bus ride at a standstill, ML reluctantly gave in. ML, Hiram, and Miss Bradley walked to the back of the bus and grabbed a handle. 'I had to stand all the way to Atlanta,' King remembered decades later, his anger still there. As the bus went up the rural highway, ML had nothing to look at but seated white people and the darkness outside. 'It was late at night and I was tired, but that wasn't the point. It was the humiliation.'"

The Atlantic presents an excerpt from Patrick Parr's The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.

"A Parasite on Public Health and the Planet"

"Protests in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan failed, despite studies showing Coke operations were even more of an environmental drain in dry areas with strained aquifers. Coke bottling persists in Rajasthan, Elmore found, because its politicians didn't want to risk losing their jobs. 'This was the brilliance of Coca-Cola capitalism,' he writes. 'By not owning its many distributors and by relying on native intermediaries in foreign nations, Coke could claim that it was a critical component of the local economy. . . . Once embedded in host communities, Coca-Cola became very difficult to dislodge, even in places where it caused serious environmental problems, because killing Coke meant killing jobs. In impoverished communities, . . . the argument of dollars and cents won the day.'"


Beth Macy in The New York Times reviews Bartow J. Elmore's Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism.


Salon runs an excerpt from Elmore's book.

"The Greater Likelihood Is that He May Have Died before His Prime"

"But 'Dock of the Bay' wasn't an ending, or shouldn't have been. Rather, it was a beginning. According to the song's co-author, Steve Cropper, Redding was obsessed with the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which had come out weeks before Redding wrote the song), and was looking to 'change his style.' And 'Dock of the Bay' is a remarkable turning point in Redding's catalogue: By 1967 he had mastered the barn-burning dance number and the candlelit love ballad, but 'Dock of the Bay' is another thing entirely, a song about homesickness that Redding turns into something elemental, existential. It's been covered by artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Sammy Hagar--understandable considering it's one of the best songs ever written--but no rendition approaches the power and depth of Redding's original. It is personal, bold, warm and warming, completely magnificent. And written and performed by a man who was only 26 years old."

Jack Hamilton at The Atlantic praises Otis Redding.

"It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way"

"Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group that has campaigned against the guest worker program, said farm work, like other difficult labor, can be made attractive to Americans at reasonable cost, and farmers should not be excused from doing so.

"'There used to be lots of American pickers who moved around the country,' he said. 'But wages have stagnated and conditions have deteriorated and agriculture is unwilling to make these jobs attractive. Think of trash collection. That’s not very appealing either. But if you offer a decent wage and conditions, people do it.'"

 

Ethan Bronner in The New York Times reports on a lawsuit in Georgia alleging hiring discrimination in farm work. 

"Honey, I'm Not Going To Stand Here And Debate The Merits Of The First Two B-52's LPs In Front Of The Whole Supermarket"

"By William T. Mayhew 

"'Why not?' I'll tell you why not: Because everybody with even half a sense of the post-punk/new-wave aesthetic can tell you that there is NO debating this subject, that's why. Hello? 'Rock Lobster'? 'Planet Claire has pink air'? Any of this ringing a bell, Mrs. Self-Declared Expert-On-All-Things-From-The-Late-'70s/Early-'80s-Athens, GA-Underground-Scene? I suppose they were playing CBGB's in 1978 because they WEREN'T cool? Unbelievable. Where's the goddamn coupon for the applesauce? Well, you had it last…'"

From The Onion, 2011.

R.E.M. Succumbs

"'I suspected this was coming last fall,' Kaplan tells Rolling Stone. 'If you remember, they weathered a lot of storms in this business, and have always operated on their own terms. [Warner Bros.] changed starting last September, and I think the demands on a band now to get a record out were more than they might have wanted to commit. I can understand that after how hard they worked for how long, the thought of going back to "paying dues" with new label staff, in a very weird industry, was too much.'"

Margaret Wappler at the Los Angeles Times reports that R.E.M. have finally disbanded.

"One of the Most Exciting and Intriguing Civil War Discoveries of the Modern Era"

"In January, working from documents of the era, Moore and graduate student Kevin Chapman began using ground radar to locate the stockade walls at the site, south of Augusta, that had become a U.S. Fish and Wildlife hatchery in 1948, and had ceased operations in 1996.
"Chapman expected to find some post holes. But during his first day of sifting dirt, he found a Union button, then a musket ball, then a large U.S. cent, the size of a half-dollar. 'The results have been stunning,' he said."

Bo Emerson in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on the discovery of the remains of Camp Lawton, a Confederate-run prison in southern Georgia.

"They Do Not Have to Compromise Their Rights for a Paycheck"

"'Guest workers are too often seen as disposable workers who can be cheated and exploited,' SPLC attorney Jim Knoepp said. 'This settlement sends a powerful message that these workers have rights and that their employers will be held accountable.'"

Chuck Bartles of the Associated Press reports via ABC News of a class-action lawsuit settlement to pay migrant workers in the south nearly three million dollars in back wages.

They Won't Forget

"Articulating the populist response was future U.S. Sen. Tom Watson, a Georgia lawyer and polemicist of such superior rhetorical gifts and inexhaustible vitriol that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck pale in comparison. Week after week in his widely circulated paper, the Jeffersonian, Watson rebutted Ochs and Lasker, arguing to his vast readership that self-appointed elites representing money and privilege had decreed that a child laborer's life was not equal in value to that of a Jewish industrialist. 'The agrarian rebel,' as historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed Watson, gave voice to a constituency that felt excluded from the halls of power in Washington and on Wall Street. When Slaton commuted Frank's sentence, Watson called for the lynching."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times revisits the Leo Frank case.

Routes

"In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House."

In The New York Times, Rachel L. Swans and Jodi Kantor trace Michelle Obama's family tree.

And a variety of writers and professors offer their opinions.

"Daughter of Slave Votes for Obama"

"Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee."

From the Austin-American Statesman, by Joshunda Sanders.

As does 114-year-old Gertrude Baines, as reported by Tami Abdollah in the Los Angeles Times.

The Garden of Good and Evil

"Freedmen had a fighting chance as long as they could count on the support of the federal government. But Washington’s commitment to racial justice, always tenuous, quickly faded. In the process, revolution gave way to restoration. By the early 1870s African-Americans had been driven out of Savannah’s political life. In the surrounding countryside blacks had been reduced to a largely landless peasantry, eking out meager livings on tiny parcels of rented land. And all along the Georgia coast local officials began to impose systematic segregation, the legalized humiliation that would culminate in Jim Crow."

In The New York Times, Kevin Boyle reviews Jacqueline Jones's Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.

I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)

"And yet Brown makes no sense at all. He endorsed Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1972. He attacked racism and spoke at civil rights rallies yet embraced onetime segregationist governor of Georgia Lester Maddox. He criticized black nationalists while declaring America was backward compared to the black revolution happening in Africa. Heck, he recorded 'Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud' and 'America Is My Home' in the same year!"

RJ Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews Nelson George and Alan Leeds's The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul.

The King of Carrot Flowers

"In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a 'cult' record, since that would imply it's some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum's haunting lyrics: 'And here's where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore.' Aeroplane isn't about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song 'Oh Comely' in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell 'Holy shit!' in the background.)"

Taylor Clark in Slate tries to figure out what happened to Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Magnum.

Get On Up

Steven Uhles in The Augusta Chronicle reports the death of Soul Brother #2, Bobby Byrd.