Official Game Thread: heat at Hawks -- The MLK Day Game!

[lethalweapon3]

Everybody Loves the Sunshine.

 

When you think of garbage? Think of Memphis! (Sorry, Akeem.)

That is meant in the most honorable way possible.

At its centennial, America and its populating, industrializing cities had a means to deal with its garbage. As a citizen, you carried your solid waste to a dump, whereby the piles would get washed into nearby rivers and streams. Alternatively, you just cut out the middlemen – rain and wind – and tossed it into the waters yourself.

Not much of a technological innovation, no. But it was an upgrade from the good ole days of tossing rubbish into streets and alleys near one’s own home. Or burying personal trash in backyards along with the daily human waste.

Either way, cities were known for their foul odor. Notably Memphis, the swampy, humid river town by the mighty Mississippi River, after New Orleans the South’s second-largest city, whose creosote-laden wood-paved streets only added to the pungent aroma as they decayed.

None of this was good for Memphians’ long-term health, but it all served as great breeding ground for mosquitos. Over two decades before Walter Reed would get famously credited for establishing the nexus between that annoying insect and the yellow fever, an outbreak of the illness that made its way up the river from New Orleans wiped out a chunk of the city population.

Having already suffered through four epidemics in fifty years, once word spread in 1878 of the deadly disease, over half of the over 40,000 Memphians, those with means, fled the city. Of those who stayed, nearly three-quarters of that population caught the illness, and almost a third of that sick subset perished.

Among those who could not leave were thousands of African-Americans. While their population was ravaged by the African-rooted yellow fever, too, perhaps due to genetics, they had a vastly lower fatality rate. The abandoning upper- and middle-class White citizenry virtually handed them the keys to the city.

African-Americans were suddenly permitted to serve as the city’s first, and last, responders – police and fire, nurses, coroner workers – while also holding municipal positions in city hall departments. Such employment opportunities wouldn’t last long after the epidemic passed. Reconstruction ground to a halt, and Jim Crow reared its ugly head.

But Memphis and its returning citizenry would take sanitation super-seriously in the following years. No more combining sewer and storm water. An artesian aquifer source provided fresher drinking water in time for the city’s rebirth. And a new citywide service was getting rolled out: routine trash collection. By the 1930s, transformed from being known as America’s filthiest city, Memphis was now celebrated perennially as this nation’s cleanest.

Unfortunately, garbage collection and disposal were not desirable occupations. And they were not rewarded well, not for the growing proportion of African-American laborers to whom these jobs fell.

Industrializing America was building its middle class through the world wars, and public investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, and emerging technology were boosting the nation and its cities into a renaissance. The rub, for many Americans who benefitted from this growth, was the growing recognition that “public” anything means one might have to share some of this bounty with others.

People we don’t know. People we don’t trust. People who don’t look like us. People who weren’t from where we grew up. People who weren’t raised the same way, nor holding the same faiths. People who weren’t already here. Them, and us. The “public”.

In the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave, the word “public” implied bravely sharing public revenue, public services, public space, public welfare, public housing, public transportation, public schools, public recreation, public accommodations, public elections and governance, public-sector jobs, and their benefits, with any and all of these People, in the neighborhoods, villages and cities we called home.

The fearful resistance to these notions – desegregation, integration, equality – was powerful, and it fostered whole industries, and cults of personality, exploiting our citizen phobias while discrediting and dismantling our willingness to rely on things genuinely “public”.

Labor unions organizing for better wages and benefits pre- and post-retirement, was a momentous and impactful development in this industrial age. But when those already benefitting had to make room in their union halls for persons of other races, and gender, and religious affiliations, one didn’t need stacks to produce this much smoke.

It did not matter, especially in the Jim Crow South, whether labor unions were intended to support private-sector or public-sector workers. Ginning up the fear of Communist influence was a handy-dandy tool for industrialist barons and their interconnected politicians to beat back pushes to organize labor.

In the boss-machine-controlled city of Memphis, its segregationist mayor (formerly the public works commissioner) staunchly refused to acknowledge the presence of a union chartered by the State of Tennessee, one that organized to represent employees like sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

In the absence of labor negotiation, your employer might grant you days off during the work week, or the calendar, might grant you a bonus for extra hours or above-and-beyond exertion, might allow you ample breaks for respite and refueling during the workday, might give you an avenue for raises or a promotion, might allow you time to address pressing family or medical needs, might gift you something upon your voluntary retirement from the job, might gift your survivors something upon your involuntary passing away. But none of this is negotiable, nor guaranteed to be applied fairly among your working associates, absent enforceable law.

On a torrentially stormy February day in this proud-to-be-pristine city of Memphis, in 1968, as sewers and streets overflowed, Cole and Walker sought momentary shelter in the one place where it was safest for them to do so -- the back of the garbage truck, driven by crewmates. Poorly maintained by the city despite decades of employee pleas, this truck’s garbage compactor malfunctioned and fatally consumed the pair.

Cole’s and Walker’s grim deaths would not be of commercial appeal in the next day’s daily newspapers. After all, Elvis Presley just gave birth to a baby girl around the same time that day. They would name her Lisa Marie. Of course, the widows would receive no insurance benefits, but offering one month’s pay for the deceased $12-15/hour (current USD) non-union workers, five hundred bucks for funeral expenses, and some half-mast flags, would serve the city well as adequate PR.

Within days, most of the city’s garbage collection stopped, as incensed truck drivers and sanitation workers went on strike. The mayor’s threats and intimidation tactics went unheeded as garbage piled high. Demonstrators, inspired from a rally speech by activist Reverend James Lawson, marched down Main Street, carrying placards with the now iconic slogan, “I AM A MAN.”

It would not take long before the movement brought Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to town from Atlanta. But this was just the latest endeavor that had heads scratching, Black and White, as the growing national sentiment was that the nation’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner had too much dip on his chip.

The whole idea of stepping up for a bus-commuting seamstress, where he resided and preached in Montgomery, was noble and all, and that his advocacy and leadership led to the desegregation of public facilities was a bonus. Standing up on behalf of shoppers in downtown Atlanta, not far from his birth home, or travelers through Mississippi, or children killed by a Klan-targeted bombing in a Birmingham church, made admissible sense to many Americans.

But what is this business of a Southern pastor moving to Illinois to protest slum conditions in Chicago? What is King’s hang-up with our “freedom”-fighting troops waging war in Southeast Asia? And what is there to gain from risking harm for himself and others – again – only this time to align with garbage workers and labor unions in Memphis? Why can’t the man just stick to his area code and rabble rouse there? Can’t he just worry about his own, “kind”?

In Memphis, King would reiterate much of the thought that prevailed when he spoke at Oberlin College in 1965:

“All I’m saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated, that, somehow, we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

King’s compassionate pleas often resonated because he had no need to modify them, not for the college-educated nor for the labor class. His sentiments were not exclusive to his parishioners, or followers of his personal faith. “You are demonstrating that we can stick together,” he would praise the sanitation workers three years later, in what would be one of his final addresses. “You are demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny…”

As you might imagine, all of this demonstrating, collaborating, debating, inspiring, was not only dangerous for a subject like King. It was exhausting, physically and mentally taxing. Everyone needs a break from their committed endeavors. For King, deep-sea fishing was his thing. He and his wife Coretta would go on vacations, to Mexico, and Jamaica, and not just to fish. Jamaica was where he completed the manuscript for, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”, and would address University of West Indies grads in a valedictory speech where he declared, “In Jamaica, I feel like a human being.”

Recreational activity was not something every working American could afford, and vacationing beyond one’s home was fraught with risk, for traveling African-Americans, of encounters of the worst kind with those who might see them as something less than human beings.

Nonetheless, vacationing allows people to get better in touch with themselves, while often allowing ourselves the joy of feeling in greater touch with humanity and the larger world we inherit and inhabit. King understood this, and he made sure to mix the business of civil and human rights advocacy with pleasure. Among his favorite deep sea fishing haunts was off the coasts of South Florida. Miami Beach, in particular.

[This is as good a place to drop the details of today’s Atlanta Hawks game with Miami’s heat (3:30 PM Eastern, 92.9 FM in ATL, TNT). Carrying on…]

“Oh my God, it blew that place wide open.” A.D. Moore was convening with other Miami desegregation activists at a segregated “Colored-only” motel, near the airport in the burgeoning middle-class black neighborhood of Brownsville, and when King foisted his “I Have A Dream” speech on the attendees, Moore knew their guest from Atlanta was quite the catch. “I’m telling you he was fantastic!”

The year? 1960. King discovered he would wow audiences of any size by speaking of a Dream “deeply rooted in the American Dream,” tugging at the thread in that garment of destiny so many Americans dare to make manifest. He would elaborate on his Dream again three years later, in 1963, first at a freedom rally in Detroit, then two months later, most famously at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the close of the March on Washington, D.C.

The Brownsville hotel in Miami would soon be rebranded as the Hampton House. Jewish citizens were once barred from acquiring property, but as those hardened rules relaxed, those with capital pounced on the opportunities. One married Jewish couple of Brownsville-area landowners bought and upgraded the motel with a swimming pool, a late night restaurant, and a jazz club. In the era where the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc on Miami Beach were off-limits to all but White citizens, the Hampton House was swinging nightly with African-American celebrities of all stripes, and their biggest fans of all races.

As with Aretha Franklin, Althea Gibson, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jackie Robinson, in Miami the Hampton House was the place to stay for MLK (that’s him enjoying the swimming pool, in the colorized photo above). Also, for the then-named mega-star, Cassius Clay, who liked to reserve the room above King’s on the new second floor. It was here where the world’s most renowned athlete would have his victory party upon vanquishing Sonny Liston, and would make fast friends with Malcolm X, initiating his conversion to Islam and the new name of Muhammad Ali. (as depicted in the 2020 Regina King drama, “One Night, in Miami…”)

King’s final moment of life was at a motel balcony in Memphis. But his final days were filled with recreation, specifically, fly fishing in the Bahamas. Ostensibly. His friend and fishing guide in Bimini, Ansil Saunders, recalled, “we didn’t have time to fish, because he just wanted to write at that time.”

King drafted his Nobel acceptance speech here, as he would his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address in Memphis. But he would also gain refreshment by connecting spiritually with his fishing guide. “Ansil, you made me feel so close to heaven,” Saunders shared of King speaking in what would be his final vacation. “I feel as though I could almost reach out and touch the face of God.”

By insisting on giving his messages about local injustices global meaning, Atlanta’s King is regarded highly in every corner of the globe, probably more than any enterprising or politicking American. This nation’s first MLK Day Parade was organized not in Atlanta, or in the nation’s capital, but in Miami, less than a decade after his death, and continues today down MLK Boulevard in Liberty City, just east of the revitalizing Brownsville community where he once loved to lodge. Murals of King and his famous quotes are easy to find in Liberty City and Overtown.

Much is made of King’s dogged global pursuits to combat the forces of injustice, here and abroad. Just as instructive was his commitment to work hard, play hard, pray hard, rest hard. The phobic resisters to the civil rights movement would not rest until they fomented unrest for King and his growing legion of followers. They failed repeatedly, even as the Drum Major for Peace now rests in peace.

In our pursuit of a more perfect union, Americans are today confronted daily by propagandists, professional contrarians, brutes in “alpha-male” disguises, and privatizers, handsomely paid from around the world, hell-bent on stripping bare the value of public institutions, marketing violence, exploitation and avarice the sole perceivable paths to personal peace. No “collective bargaining” allowed, the boot-strappers will insist. “All men are created equal” is superseded in this milieu: it must be “Every man for himself,” and only if we dare to count you as one of us men.

King’s voice cuts through the din as sharp and as clear as it did in his heyday. It reminds us of our divine interconnectedness, and of our need to occasionally disconnect from the clamor, in order to reconnect with where our strengths truly derive: the diversity of our livelihoods, our environments, our families, our faiths, our dreams, melting together in this pot of righteousness.

The pursuits of genuine justice across the lands, and not simply for ourselves and those we individually hold dear, figuratively and often literally requires some offshore fishing. We must strive to nurture a bionetwork, where when we think of garbage, we think of where it goes, and of the people who make their living handling it for the benefit of everyone’s health. An ecosystem, where our future fishers of justice can lay their bait deep, and not suffer the indignities of reeling in the garbage strewn by those who came before them.

 

Let’s Go Hawks!

~lw3

[Diesel]

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

“All I’m saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated, that, somehow, we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

This is deep!! 

[Guest]

Beautifully written.

It was a gift to be able to read it.

Thank you!

[JayBirdHawk]

Well done as usual @lethalweapon3

[lethalweapon3]

More related links to come, including a tweet from yesterday:

https://historic-memphis.com/memphis-historic/yellow-fever/yellow-fever.html

https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/things-to-do/history-and-heritage/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-impact-on-miami

https://thenewtropic.com/hampton-house/

~lw3

[shakes]

glad the game is mid afternoon.   Only need to go off the grid for a couple hours before I get home from work and can fire up the DVR.

[lethalweapon3]

Quote

 

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer.

In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.”

We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.

In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!

 

https://www.thirteen.org/blog-post/martin-luther-kings-most-controversial-speech-beyond-vietnam/

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Do we dare to have a full squad?

Clint Capela (strained calf) is upgraded to Questionable, as of this morning's latest Injury/Illness report. Trae Young (sore shoulder) is Probable.

Kyle Lowry (knee pain) has been out for the past week and missed the heat's last three wins, which included a second-straight home win over Milwaukee (no Giannis in either of those games).

Frontcourt contributors Duncan Robinson (finger surgery), Omer Yurtseven (ankle surgery) and Nikola Jovic (back stress reaction) remain out for Erik Spoelstra's squad, while Caleb Martin (strained quad) is listed as Questionable. Dewayne Dedmon has yet to play for Coach Spo since Massage Gun Gate, and he had been getting nearly Udonis Haslem (DNP'd since Dec. 15) floortime anyway.

Even with Buckets and Bam out there, opportunities abound for Atlanta to pounce in the paint.

 

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

MLK PRO TIP: When you go to hang out in The Bahamas, just stick to fly fishing.

~lw3

[JayBirdHawk]

He's baaaack.

 

Bring him off the bench.

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[lethalweapon3]

For the theists among us, one more MLK sermon sample, on faith, fear, and fishing!

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-xiv-mastery-fear-or-antidotes-fear

Quote

 

A final way to master fear is through faith. One of the commonest sources of fear is the consciousness of deficient resources and of consequent inadequqcy for life. All too many people are attempting to face the tension of life with inadequate inner resources.

While on a recent vacation in Mexico, Mrs. King and I rented a boat and went deep sea fishing. Having limited money to spend we rented a rather cheap boat that was old and ill-equipped. At first we gave this no thought. But after getting about ten miles from shore the clouds began to hover low and the howling winds began to blow in fierce fury.

Immediately we were afraid because we knew that we had an inadequate boat that was not able to stand strong amid a storm. As we made our way back to the shore we were inflicted every minute with a paralyzing fear. Multitudes of people are in such a situation. Heavy winds, weak boats—they are afraid.

Many of our fears, particularly the abnormal ones, can be dealt with by the skills of psychiatry. This relatively new discipline pioneered by Sigmund Freud is a vital means of investigating the sub-conscious drive of men, and of discovering how and why these fundamental energies are diverted into neurotic channels. It can help us to look unflinchingly at our inner selves, and with searching fingers to probe out the causes of our failures and fears.

Much of our fearful living, however, moves in a realm where the service of psychiatry is ineffectual unless the psychiatrist is a man of religious faith. For the trouble with us is simply that we are attempting to face fear without faith; we are attempting to sail through the stormy seas of life without strong spiritual boats.

This is why one of the leading physicians and psychiatrists of America said: “The only known cure for fear is faith.”²⁰ The abnormal fears and phobias that express themselves in neurotic anxiety can be cured by psychiatry, but the fear of death, nonbeing and nothingness which expresses itself in existential anxiety can only be cured by a positive religious faith.

Such a faith imbues us with a sense of the trustworthiness of the universe, and a feeling of relatedness to God. A positive religious faith does not leave us with the illusion that we will be exempted from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease; rather it instills us with the inner equilibrium to face the strains, burdens and fears that will inevitably come.

 

~lw3

[JayBirdHawk]

Looks like we will have the full squad back today, for only the 2nd time this season.  Last time it didn't go so well and Nate only played 8 players.

 

[JayBirdHawk]

Maybe

 

 

[DS5]

Bogi is not in the injury list. Trade coming?

[JayBirdHawk]

Let's go Hawks, make it 3-0 in last 41.

 

-GmKqQ

 

 

 

 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

Whole squad!!!

 

 

[Spud2nique]

Thanks lw3.

This one was for MLK. We need to be wearing those unis today not peach .

2K by 7. BIG O dominated. 

Hawks make it 3 in a row.

GO HAWKS! 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

Nice pass from Hunter to OO.