I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: racism

  • say her name: Breonna Taylor – marking the one year anniversary of her death

    say her name: Breonna Taylor – marking the one year anniversary of her death


    Today, March 13th. marks the one year anniversary of the murder of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old black woman killed by police in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Ms. Taylor was an Emergency Room tech for the University of Louisville Health. This morning her mother, Ms. Tamika Palmer, was interviewed on television by two millenials who struggled to ask appropriate questions.

    Question: How do you feel on this first anniversary of your daughter’s death?

    Ms. Palmer: Like I’ve felt every day this year. I feel anger, rage…I feel like I don’t want to get out of bed when I wake up…but then I feel I have a job to do to work to get justice for Breonna’s death.”

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    “Three hundred and sixty-five days. Four police chiefs. Two fatal shootings tied to protests. Hundreds of protesters arrested. Zero charges for the three police officers who fired 32 bullets in the early morning raid that killed Breonna Taylor, hitting her six times.

    It has been a long, painful year for Taylor’s family, and for Louisville, a city straddling the American midwest and south once known for its college basketball prowess and the annual Kentucky Derby.

    It is now more readily identifiable as the city where Taylor was shot and killed by police a year ago Saturday.” – Josh Wood, The Guardian, March 13, 2021

    Zero charges…unbelievable. The voice of Oprah as she explained the remarkable cover of Breonna Taylor for their September, 2020 issue of Oprah Magazine continues to resonate:

     “For the first time in 20 years, @oprah has given up her O Magazine cover to honor Breonna Taylor. She says, Breonna Taylor. She was just like you. And like everyone who dies unexpectedly, she had plans. Plans for a future filled with responsibility and work and friends and laughter. Imagine if three unidentified men burst into your home while you were sleeping. And your partner fired a gun to protect you. And then mayhem. What I know for sure: We can’t be silent. We have to use whatever megaphone we have to cry for justice. And that is why Breonna Taylor is on the cover of O magazine. I cry for justice in her name…”

    Today on this 13th day of Women’s History Month I also cry for justice in Breonna Taylor’s name, a young woman who made history for the wrong reasons but whose legacy will forever be linked to the struggles for justice for all women everywhere. Say her name.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

     

     

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

  • images of change – pandemic style

    images of change – pandemic style


    Gamecock women’s basketball – March, 2020

    Guard LeLe Grissett, Gamecock Garner, me and Pretty

    Pretty and me at SEC tournament – March, 2021

    Our spirits were high as we drove away from the SEC women’s basketball tournament in Greenville, South Carolina on March 08, 2020. Pretty and I were riding with our gay boys basketball buddies Garner and JD, our Gamecock women’s basketball team had just won the tournament championship for five out of the last six years, everyone in our car (and many other fans in the Gamecock nation) looking forward to post season play, and let’s be real, talking about a possible second national championship. Our team finished the season ranked #1 in the polls, but that ranking would surely be tested in post season play.

    Until it wasn’t. Three days later on March 11th the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a/k/a Covid-19 to be a pandemic. The next day the NCAA cancelled the men’s and women’s basketball post season tournaments. March Madness, the term reserved for the race to basketball championships, took on new meaning. In 2020 the Madness went, literally, viral.

    Although our Gamecock women managed to play their regular  season in the fall of 2020 with cardboard fans sitting in the student section, no band played on; cheerleaders who were socially distanced – waving garnet and white pompoms – tried to lift the morale of the 3,500 masked lucky fans allowed to occupy designated seats in the 18,000 capacity Colonial Life Arena. Pretty went to two home games during the season, but I didn’t want to risk the exposure to the virus so I watched the televised games or listened to the radio coverage when TV wasn’t available. Thank goodness for my trusted transistor radio which never misses a game. (Pretty encourages me to ask Alexa to play the game on the radio for me, but I tell her Alexa hasn’t been there for me as long as my real radio has.)

    One year and two Pfizer vaccinations later for me, Pretty and I went back to Greenville on March 06th. for the 2021 SEC tournament. We wanted to watch our Gamecock women play Tennessee in the semi-final, a revenge game for the loss they handed us during the regular season – a loss that ended our 31-game win streak for regular season play in the SEC. We were fired up and ready to go.

    I could hardly escape the irony of my first safely vaccinated outing as we drove home from Greenville last Saturday night. The Gamecocks did win against Tennessee that night (and won the tournament again the following day) – Pretty and I were almost as euphoric as we had been during the drive home in 2020. Yet, changes were everywhere. We were without our basketball buddies, we had to wear masks to be admitted to the game, very few fans scattered in our section for social distancing, still no live school bands, the arena resembled a community teetering on the brink of becoming a ghost town with unrecognizable citizens.

    Despite the tragedies that defined 2020, despite the deeply felt losses of family and friends to Covid, despite the changes that challenged our way of life – I feel hope again. I am so proud of the Democrats in Congress and President Biden who delivered on a campaign promise for an American Rescue Act that will begin to restore security for citizens who are struggling with basic needs for their loved ones. Food, housing, jobs, small businesses, farmers – a chance to breathe again. A chance for opportunity to do better.

    My tiny version of hope also took place at a women’s basketball tournament last weekend where I was still able to sit with my wife and enjoy a few hours that reminded me of a time not very long ago and certainly not far away. It felt good to do something ordinary, even if the ordinary was not quite the same.

    This week has been a blockbuster. Pretty got her first Moderna vaccination. Our 17 months old granddaughter Ella was with us on our screen porch during a perfectly gorgeous early spring day and we added Amy Winehouse songs to her playlist. Life is good.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • we are all Wonder Women


    Huge thanks to my good Sister Marla Wood for posting this powerful image on her FB page. I thought when I saw it, wow, this is a great theme for Women’s History Month. Let’s get down to it.

    In March, 2021 women are in powerful positions across the globe. Vice President Kamala Harris cast a deciding vote in the US Senate March 04th. to break a tie (50 Democrats for – 50 Republicans against) beginning debate on President Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion Covid Relief Bill approved by the House of Representatives. Bi-partisan support for the bill? No, not really.

    But the first woman veep in American history who also serves constitutionally as President of the Senate said hey boys, either jump on this train to help people who are sick, jobless, grieving the loss of loved ones, struggling to keep food on the table and/or a roof over their heads for their children because of a pandemic the previous administration chose to ignore as science fiction – or don’t. This train is leaving the station.

    Celebrate Women’s History Month by discovering the Wonder Woman you are!

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: these are his stories, these are his songs

    Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: these are his stories, these are his songs


    “The church is the oldest, the most continuous and most important institution ever created by the African American people.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told Jeffrey Brown of PBS in an interview about his new four hour two-part documentary The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song that premiered on PBS in February as a salute to Black History Month. Gates should know since he is the writer, host and executive producer of the film aimed at telling the amazing stories of the people who shaped not only religion but also politics and culture through more than 400 years of black American life in this country.

    Johnson & Johnson, one of the corporate sponsors of the documentary, introduced the PBS special with these words: “Not all black American stories are simple or easy to tell, but for many years Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has told them like no one else by rediscovering lost narratives, correcting historical misconceptions, resurrecting forgotten heroes. Johnson & Johnson has been with him through all these years and will still be along for this incredible journey.”

    From the primitive Praise House on St. Helena Island, one of the sea islands in Beaufort County on the lower coast of South Carolina, to the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston that was the site of the massacre of nine members including pastor Clementa Pinckney in June, 2015, the black church in the United States has helped to define the journey of African Americans from enslavement to emancipation, from Jim Crow to public lynchings, from segregation to Civil Rights.

    Dr. Gates (PhD from Cambridge) is internationally recognized and respected as an author, literary critic, professor, public intellectual, documentary film producer, essayist and historian whose life-long passion for black history focuses on weaving the African American experience into the fabric of a multi-racial, multi-cultural community that delineates his hope for the country he calls home. He serves currently as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

    Sound stuffy? Not so much. One of my favorite scenes in the Black Church documentary (that I’ve now watched two times!) is the visit by Dr. Gates to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Patrice Turner, a Director of Worship and Arts as well as an accomplished gospel pianist, sits at a piano in a large empty worship auditorium with only Dr. Gates standing next to the piano, clapping, singing, thoroughly enjoying two favorite spirituals “Ride On, King Jesus” no man can hinder thee and “Great Gettin’ Up Morning” fare ye well, fare ye well. Thank you, Jesus! he exclaimed when the music stopped.

    Clearly the documentary celebrates not only the enduring faith of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. but also acknowledges the shortcomings of the black church in its dealings through the years with sexism, homophobia and domestic violence. For example, one of the unresolved questions today is where is the black church in Black Lives Matter?

    We celebrate Black History Month in February every year, and this year I choose to honor a living historian whose stories inspire me and whose songs lift me up from the inharmonious existence of a Covid-19 universe. Thank you, Dr. Gates!

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass

    Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass


    Found your pilot. Died in 1956. Earl Matthew Quigg of Hokenbaqua, Pennsylvania. Born in 1930. Air force. Married. Died on Sept. 17 at 3:15 pm of crushing injuries and conflagration, .7 miles south of Richards, Texas in open pasture.

    Thanks to my first cousin Melissa on my daddy’s side who sent me this text message after our conversation earlier in the week, a conversation that went down a rabbit hole and somehow circled to a memory of school children playing softball one afternoon behind the little red brick public school building in Richards – play interrupted by the roar of a jet plane engine as the airplane careened crazily out of the sky.

    Melissa is the real journalist in our family; she wore many hats working for Texas newspapers during her career and that background makes her a wonderful sleuth/researcher on all subjects great and small. Naturally she was able to retrieve the information for me about a mysterious plane crash in Richards, Texas that remained a vivid memory for me 65 years later.

    I was ten years old at the time, but I still remembered our small group of boys and girls standing frozen together on the playground in the few moments the jet screamed past us to hit the ground in a field just beyond where we played, bursting into flames with thick black smoke billowing from the explosion, causing us to look at each other with horrified disbelief.

    For the tiny town of Richards, Texas (pop. 500+) this was the equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. The theory of 2nd Lieutenant Earl M Quigg’s heroism discussed at great length by my grandparents at their kitchen table was that he refused to safely eject during his spiral in order to save the lives of the children he saw on the playground below. I never forgot the name of this pilot who I believed saved my ten year old life.

    As a teenager when I began writing my version of “poetry,” one of my poems celebrated the bravery of Lieutenant Quigg. I mentioned this to Melissa when we chatted earlier, and she made the mistake of asking me if I’d saved the poem. That would be from 65 years ago, in case anyone is counting. She suggested I write a blog about the plane crash and include my poem. Great idea, I said.

    While Pretty keeps everything she’s ever had in her entire life, I save almost nothing except words and pictures but that means decades upon decades of words and pictures which have made their journeys with me from the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Southeast, zigzagging back and forth to Texas in between. Surely I kept my first poetry attempts. Alas, as of this writing I have had no luck in my search.

    However, my digging around through boxes in my office encouraged me to step through the looking glass of another rabbit hole which allowed me to avoid the pandemic and politics (both equally disturbing) of today, transporting me to a time long ago and far away.

     

    my grandfather in his barber shop cutting 

     Melissa’s daughter Nikki’s hair: a Morris family tradition

    Maybe this picture of my grandfather in his single chair barber shop was taken Father’s Day weekend in June, 1984, the year I got this letter from my granddaddy. I did have the good common sense to save these words from him. He was born in 1898 and died in October, 1987, three years after this picture was taken. My paternal grandmother wrote me faithfully every week from the time I moved away from Richards at the age of 13 in 1959 to the year she died in 1983, but my grandfather was embarrassed about his lack of schooling and never wrote me until after my grandmother passed. In June, 1984 I was living in South Carolina, a thousand miles from Texas  and my grandpa.

    My Dear Sheila, I just came in from church out at Pool’s or Dark Corner as Tom Grissom called it. Bro. W.A. Curtis is doing the preaching not a Bad Preacher Tells a few Tales kinder mixas them up keeps you awake. Sheila, I have something to pass the time with now 15 quail 10 little ones & 5 grown I liked to make a miss count. Had a real good Father’s Day will give you a run down on that later.

    Tomatoes have just started to get ripe and the vines are loaded lots of string beans & baby lima looks like they are going to do good I have two rows about as long as a hoe handle. Now for the Father’s day. Your mother came first brought lunch & watermillon & a pretty shirt we had a real good visit enjoyed her so much. We discussed the Sheads at length not too bad. Ray came Fri. Lucille Sat. Sun. Mike, Melissa, Nikki. Ray a radio & Lucille a hat from London she had given me pr.pants Mike & Melissa shirt

    Gaylen card & face lotion Gene & Patti card and last but not least was a very pretty sweet card from my Dear Grand Daughter I can’t tell you how much I love you and always have. You ment so much to Ma & me, ole bald headed Pa

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    Pa, I can’t tell you how much I loved you and Ma and always will. I hope Pretty and I can give our granddaughter the same unwavering love you always gave me.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned, my friends.