Ramblin' with Roger

Book review: African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley

Wilkes-Barre, PA

On July 7, at the Albany Public Library, I spoke about the book African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley: 1778-1990 by Emerson L. Moss, published by the Wyoming Valley Historical and Geological Society and the Wilkes University Press in 1992.

Why am I reporting on such an obscure book? In part, it’s because it’s been in my collection for a while. Also, it mentions by name a couple of my ancestors.

First off, what is the Wyoming Valley? “It is a historic, industrialized region of Northeastern Pennsylvania consisting of Lackawanna, Wyoming, and Luzerne counties, with Luzerne being the largest in terms of both area and population. The region is historically notable for its role in fueling the American Industrial Revolution through its many anthracite coal mines. As a metropolitan area, it is known as the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, after its principal cities. With a population of 567,559 as of the 2020 United States census, it is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Pennsylvania, after the Philadelphia metropolitan area, Greater Pittsburgh, the Lehigh Valley (Allentown-Bethlehem), and the Harrisburg–Carlisle metropolitan statistical areas.”

While not specifically an ethnography, it does “explore cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. It also… involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members’ own interpretation of such behavior.”

Breakdown

Chapter I is The Early African-American Experience in America, 1619-1896, which traces the timeline from the origins of slavery in the future USA to the dreadful Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case. It occurred to me that 35 years ago, knowledge about slavery, especially in the non-black community, was rather sparse. Most of them weren’t reading Lenore Bennett’s Before The Mayflower.

Charles Miner was a pioneer civil rights advocate, elected to the US House of Representatives in 1824 (yes, he was white).

Chapter II, The African-American in Pennsylvania, 1639-1887, noted that William Penn, who founded the future state, was a slaveholder. In 1700, PA passed Black Codes, though a few religious groups opposed the bigotry.

There is a fascinating debate in Congress, including by H.B. Wright from Luzerne County, about why blacks were unfit for war, and that black soldiers would make white soldiers leave the service.

Chapter III, Early African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, noted that a 1798 census showed 11 slaves and 13 free non-whites in Luzerne County. Nevertheless, there was a strong anti-abolitionist streak in the area, as well as a vibrant Underground Railroad system. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made things even more troubled. Black people could not vote until after the Civil War.

Chapter IV, Religious Life, and Chapter V, Education, were often intertwined because state laws and local regulations made it difficult to establish schools, leaving churches to fill the gap. Chapter VI, Organizations, focused on social entities such as lodges and the NAACP. and certain YMCAs, where black folks could participate freely.

Relative

Chapter VI is titled First Families Remembered. The first listed was the Patterson Family. As I wrote about here, Samuel Patterson, my great-great-grandfather, who fought in the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry during the American Civil War. Oddly, neither his wife nor his mother is mentioned by name. S.J. later had a very successful tile company. Another family listed was the Patience family, a couple of whom married Pattersons, unsurprisingly.

The Afterward was titled “The Community Today,” which was rather critical of the lack of progress. Appendix A, Remembrances of Blacks in the Wyoming Valley, contained bios of several folks, including some 19th-century weddings. Appendix B (local black members of the US military) and Appendix C (Black business in the Wyoming Valley in 1910) both mentioned SJ Patterson. There were additional sections about medical, legal, religious, and sports figures.

The book is a robust look, especially at Luzerne County black life. Sometimes, one could extrapolate from the specific examples in this book to other northern communities with small but robust black populations.

Surely, the pride in local accomplishments applies to places I’ve lived.

Ring Doorbell Camera

Police Surveillance Technology

In the New York Times, Emily Keegin offered Welcome to My Museum of America. She put together “a collection of 25 objects that reveal something special about us.” Along with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, and Personal Injury Lawyer Advertisements (for sure), she offered up the Ring Doorbell Camera.

“Have we always been so scared of strangers? And when did we, as a country supposedly built on individual liberties, become so enthusiastic about Big Brother-style surveillance? Maybe we are still haunted by the ghost of Michael Wigglesworth and the Massachusetts Puritans who looked out from their chapels and saw only ‘a waste of howling wilderness.’ Maybe we still believe that safety can be found only beneath the eye of a benevolent and omniscient lord. The Puritans had God. We have Jeff Bezos. In a nation plagued by loneliness, perhaps it’s time to start answering the door.”

My wife and I had a couple of passing conversations about them. She thought that if we had had one, we would have captured the late Nick, the absentee landlord of the property next door, when he damaged my wife’s car more than once. But my discomfort was great.

Mass surveillance

And it got worse when I saw Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s segment on Police Surveillance Technology. “In recent years, the prevalence of local mass surveillance systems has exploded thanks to cheaper technology and increased funding from the federal government. And this all tends to get presented as a boon to public safety. Local news loves to cover cities’ real-time crime centers…

“Here’s one in Cooper City, Florida. And in that story, the town’s then mayor offered this upbeat assessment. ‘Everyone is being watched. And if you’re doing nothing wrong, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, but when you’re doing something wrong, we’re going to find out. We’re going to have the wherewithal to come and get you. We’ve got essentially Big Brother on steroids.'”

Oliver got into how the technology is used as a “digital form of stop and frisk, ” often hooked into surveillance cameras. “Increasingly, they’re able to use those owned by private businesses or homeowners. There are an estimated 85 million in this country, and police now routinely request access to them.”

Oliver has also noted the technological shortcomings. “The way Shot Spotter works is it basically sets up microphones all over a city, which alert police if they sense a loud noise that could be a gunshot… Unfortunately, the technology seems nowhere near as good as you’d want it to be for that kind of response. An AP investigation found the systems can miss live gunfire right under their microphones or misclassify the sounds of fireworks as gunshots. While other reports found Spotter being activated by cars backfiring or even people using a nail gun.”

ALPRs

“And there is a similar issue with… automated license plate readers or ALPRs. And cops will claim that they’re a way to find stolen cars or those engaged in suspicious activity.

“The most popular are made by a company called Flock. And here is how they work. Flock license plate readers don’t just scan tags looking for stolen cars or vehicles on a hot list. The cameras take a photo of every car that passes, stamped with the precise time and location. The more cameras you pass, the clearer the picture of your movements. All of that data is saved in a database for 30 days, shared with connected police departments, allowing the government to go back in time to see where your car was and when. No warrant required, whether you’re suspected of a crime or not.

“A randomized trial in Vallejo, California, found that 37% of all ALPR hits from fixed readers like those attached to a street light, and 35% from mobile ALPRs, like those on cop cars, were misreads, which is an astonishingly high error rate. And that has had real consequences.”

CBS News has had several stories like this one in several jurisdictions: Privacy groups raise red flags over police misuse of Flock cameras, usually for personal use. The Oliver story touches on that as well. Common Cause is advocating to tell Congress: Defund Flock’s surveillance cameras nationwide.

From the NYT: Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don’t. “In Texas, there’s one thing liberals and conservatives agree on: They don’t want cameras trained on their cars.”

Atlas of Surveillance

Oliver pointed to the Atlas of Surveillance, Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities with Open Source Research. It shows Albany County, NY using Flock, and the state using other technologies.

Oliver: “It is worth remembering, even when these systems work perfectly, they can still be wildly invasive. Cameras and license plate readers can track your movements wherever you go, which means they could find out if you, say, attended a protest or visited an abortion clinic.”

“And some departments can then use all the data fed into them to engage in our final and maybe dumbest use of this tech. It’s called predictive policing. Basically using all that data to figure out which areas or individuals might be likely sources of crime.

“Shot Spotter and license plate readers are disproportionately used in communities of color. And cameras are often associated with

You should watch the whole thing. It may have you think differently about your Ring Camera. I’ll pass, thank you.

1976 Hot Country Singles of 1976, part two

Conway Twitty

Here are the 1976 Hot Country Singles, Part Two. They were all #1 for a single week, in part a function of market manipulation.

It’s fascinating to me that I know many of the artists, but not the music, at least in this decade: Bill Anderson, Ronnie Milsap, Conway Twitty, and Tammy Wynette, to name a few.

You’ll Lose A Good Thing – Freddy Fender

Till I Can Make It On My Own – Tammy Wynette; her stated personal favorite among all that she had written and recorded.

Drinking My Baby (Off My Mind) – Eddie Rabbit

Together Again – Emmylou Harris, a 1964 Buck Owens song; I think I own this on vinyl

Don’t The Girls All Get Prettier At Closing Time – Mickey Gilley

My Eyes Can Only See as Far As You – Charlie Pride

What Goes On When The Sun Goes Down – Ronnie Milsap

After All The Good Is Gone – Conway Twitty. He broke through in 1955. He died during surgery in 1993 at the age of 59. Conway was inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.

I’ll Get Over You – Crystal Gayle; my greatest hits albums of hers I’ve got from my late FIL’s collection

All These Things – Joe Stampley

The Door Is Always Open – Dave and Sugar

Golden Ring – George Jones and Tammy Wynette

Say It Again – Don Williams

Covers

Bring It On Home To Me – Mickey Gilley. Yes, the Sam Cooke classic from 1962

If You’ve Got The Money, I’ve Got The Time – Willie Nelson, a #1 hit for Left Frizell, who co-wrote it, in 1950

Here’s Some Love – Tanya Tucker

The Games That Daddies Play – Conway Twitty. He didn’t write every one of his hits, but he did pen this one

Among My Souvenirs – Marty Robbins. This was a $1 song by Paul Whiteman in 1928!

Cherokee Maiden – Merle Haggard. Bob Wills had first recorded this song in 1941:

Movie review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Gatsby”/Lolita/Daisy Miller/Pride and Prejudice

My wife recommended that we go to the Spectrum 8 Theatre and watch the movie Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m almost always interested in seeing movies unfamiliar to me, so we attended on a Thursday afternoon; alas, only one other person was present.

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with the non-fiction book by Iranian author and academic Azar Nafisi, published in 2003. It is based on her own experiences while teaching English literature at the University of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.”

The film seems to hew closely to the book, but it does not necessarily follow its chronology. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, Azar (Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi) return to their homeland, expecting more freedom.

Unfortunately, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini meant a different change. She gets pushback, initially from a young man in her class, who thinks there was nothing redeeming about The Great Gatsby because of the moral turpitude of the main couple – adultery! The country increasingly becomes more restrictive.

“Gatsby” for 1979 was the first piece, followed by “Lolita” (1995), Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” (1988), and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1996).

The professor ultimately gets fired from her position. Society requires the hijab. Her ultimate response was to teach these classes – for women only for a variety of reasons. It’s in those discussions, shown in much brighter hues than much of the rest of the film, that allow great insights about liberation.

My favorite involved Pride and Prejudice, where the professor explains how conveying dialogue and even flirtation in the midst of regimented dance.

Pretty good

This was a good, not great movie. One is already in the movie’s corner going in. The episodic nature of the film didn’t always gel. It was still worthwhile, because, as Peter Travers noted in his 2.5 stars-out-of-4 review, “Today, the book banning strikes a raw nerve in America, the country the women once regarded as a haven for freedom seekers.”

(A recent example: South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing. “The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident.”)

Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 86% positive rating, but not enough audience patrons viewed the film to comment.

The film was made in Italy, and some narratives were fictionalized to protect some of the real people portrayed. It was released originally in 2024, but didn’t make it to the US until July 2026.

“The “authentic home-grown folk singer”

Les Green, my dad

Here’s an article about my father, Les Green. It’s a column by Tom Cawley, a longtime staffer at the (Binghamton, NY) Evening Press from Friday, 2 June, 1967.

There were quite a few articles about Dad in the Binghamton papers between about 1959 until he, my mother, and my baby sister moved to Charlotte, NC, in 1974. Several of the narratives were about his civil rights activities, a bunch were about his musicality, and a few were about his other volunteer efforts.

This one is curious for a few reasons. Cawley is relying on the reporting of another person. I found Jerry Handte’s commentary somewhat limiting. That said, Les Green being “the authentic home-grown folk singer of the town he was born” with great stage presence, et al., is right on target.

Incidentally, by 1968, my father QUIT working at IBM, because the job was mind-numbing. My homeroom/biology teacher at Daniel Dickinson, Mr. Joseph, told me that my father was crazy. I happened to believe that driving materials around on forklifts was making him pretty miserable. My mother and sisters didn’t see him much during the week for that five or six years.

He ended up working for Opportunities for Broome, and Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) more in line with his passions

But I read that he WROTE a canal song? And he was going to perform it? This is something I seem to have totally forgotten.

That he was going to perform it at the American Civil Association is not a surprise, since he volunteered there frequently. (My 16th birthday party in March 1969 was held there.)

My father died August 10, 2000, in Charlotte, NC, ostensibly from prostate cancer, at the age of 73. Hmm, I’M 73.

Les Green