Underground Railroad Conference


The 9th Annual UGR History Conference: Gender, Class, Race and Ethnicity in Abolitionism, on the Underground Railroad, and in the Struggle Since will take place February 26, 27, 28, 2010
Organized by Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc.
Hosted by Russell Sage College, Troy, New York
In Collaboration with Rensselaer County Historical Society

February 26
“The Not So Underground Underground Railroad” Teacher Workshop
Rhonda Y. Williams, Ph.D. – evening guest speaker
“Railroads, Streets and Bridges – Black Women and Freedom Journeys”

February 27
Rosemary Sadlier–Mary Ann Shadd: Publisher, Editor, Teacher, Lawyer, Suffragette

Workshops, cultural performance, vendors, poster displays
Join with scholars, artists, historians, preservationists, educators, students, community members and others to explore how the forces of gender, class, race and ethnicity have influenced the UGR and movements for freedom that have arisen in its wake.

February 28
2-hour tour of Troy’s UGR and African American heritage sites

A complete listing of pre-conference activities, workshops, speakers,
accommodations, sponsors and directions is available

REGISTER at www.ugrworkshop.com or 518-432-4432

Previous conferences:
2009 The Underground Railroad, Its Legacies, and Our Communities
2008 The Underground Railroad – How It Worked: Two Centuries of Escape,
Resistance, and the UGR Across the Continent”.
2007 Underground Railroad: Uncovering the Voices of Women
2006 The Underground Railroad: Connecting Pathways to Liberty
2005 The Underground Railroad: Discoveries and Emerging stories
2004 The Underground Railroad: Quests for Freedom
2003 The Underground Railroad: Movement And Context
2002 Telling the Untold Story: The Underground Railroad In Albany and the
Surrounding Region

I mention this every year for only three reasons:

1. I’ve gone to these events in the past and they are always very worthwhile attending.
2. The subject matter, I believe, is important.
3. Mary Liz and Paul Stewart, the organizers of the event, and indeed the co-founders of the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, are good friends of mine.

I have a fourth reason this year: I’m doing one of the workshops on Saturday afternoon. So sign up already!

(n.b. – I took off from work Monday to finish off this presentation. Instead, I stayed home with a sick child; not nearly so productive. This to say that if the blog posts are a little terse for the next few days, that’s why.)
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African American Newspapers: Catalysts for Social Change
Thursday,February 25th, 12:15 – 1:15 PM
Location: Librarians Room, 7th floor, Cultural Education Center, Madison Avenue, Albany (New York State Library)
Register Online

African American newspapers provided vital information to the African American community by reporting stories from a perspective often ignored by their counterparts. During the Great Migration era, many subscribers in the south depended on news reports from northern publications for an accurate picture of northern life and opportunities for African Americans. In this presentation, Cordell Reaves, Historic Preservation Program Analyst at the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, will explore the impact of some of these publications and how they shaped African American life primarily during the early to mid-1900s. Bring your lunch.
ROG

Things I Love on the Internet

* A new blog on the Oscars and Instant Runoff Voting — http://oscarvotes123.blogspot.com/. Here’s a post about the new voting system for Best Picture, written by the Chair of FairVote Board of Directors, Krist Novoselic.
* The last new Johnny Cash album, American VI: Ain’t No Grave is being released on February 23, during what would have been his birthday week. Am buying, sound unheard, if I don’t get for my birthday.
* Brian from Coverville turned me on to Deanne Iovan’s mission, inspired by Julie & Julia, as well as the 09/09/09 Beatles’ releases, of covering The Beatles’ White Album, track by track, putting out a new song every nine days. She just put out Julia, which is at the end of side two. (Side 2? Hey, I grew up with the vinyl version of this album.)
* 500 cartoons on life in biology research.
* The Business Librarians listserv helped me answer a question this week. Apparently the doohickey on the tops to plastic containers, where the grated cheese comes out, one side being a shaker while the other side you can use a teaspoon to dish it out, is called a spice lid or a dispensing closure.
* Valentine’s Day/Census tie-in campaign with a selection of electronic postcards in Spanish and English.
* New CPR on YouTube: Continuous Chest Compression CPR – Mayo Clinic Presentation, sent to me by a nurse friend of mine, who thinks it’s terrific.
* A recent study outlines the health benefits of having more sex. CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen has the details.
* My medical reimbursement company, only this week, has FINALLY decided to accept e-mailed PDFs, GIFs, etc. as well as mailing and faxes. This is particularly helpful since our fax at work does not seem to work. (When someone announced “Fax is dead!””, they weren’t kidding.)
* Found several places: The Muppets: Beaker’s Ballad – the Internet is SO mean.
* Thom Wade points to Hey! It’s That Guy!? It’s a page “dedicated to the character actors collectively known as ‘That Guy’.” Simon Oakland was one of the first ones I knerw by name as a kid.
* Betty White for host of SNL. My only problem is the notion that it’s a resurgence; she never really left.
* Arthur@AmeriNZ found a video response to the Google Super Bowl ad done from a gay man’s POV.
* An old friend accidentally pushed some button that sent an email to EVERY address in her e-address book, which allowed us to reconnect. I’ve had a child and she’s had two since we last communicated.
*Local school catches Olympic fever. “Events have included ring toss, rock climbing, hockey, boggle, hang man, reading comprehension, and math facts.” I’ll pick math facts.
* The 9th Annual Underground Railroad History Conference, Friday, February 26 at 8:30am through Sunday, February 28 at 2:00pm at Russell Sage College, Troy, NY, where I’ll be one of many presenting on that Saturday. Register now!

ROG

The Breakfast Blog


My friend Dan really cracked me up, when, in his comment to my NaBloPoMo post, he described my blog as one of the “Breakfast Blogs. That what I call blogs like yours, Roger. ‘For today’s post I’m going to tell you what I had for breakfast this morning! I had exactly what I told you I had for breakfast in yesterday’s post, but today I also had a big glass of orange juice! Let me tell you how that came about!’ etc.”

For the record, I can recall noting my breakfast habits five times in four and a half years, twice in my dedication to cold cereal, especially mixed; one about maple syrup; and a couple times in response to a meme question. OK, and once in answer to this question. That’s about once every nine months.

And it’s fine that he has a more “slow cooking” blog. Frankly, if I wrote as infrequently as he does, I’m afraid I wouldn’t write anything at all. I have so many ideas, or at least pieces of ideas floating around in my head at any given time.
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What I will tell you is that I went to a comic book show on Sunday, well described by Fred Hembeck here (November 3). Had a grand old time talking with Fred, his wife Lynn Moss, John Hebert and his wife and mother, Bill Anderson, Joe Staton and especially Rocco Nigro. But what Fred and Rocco and I all said at different points was, “Where’s Alan David Doane?” He plugged the event in his blog and then no one saw him there. Maybe he was incognito in one of those Watchman or Star Wars costumes; one really can’t tell much about a person in a Darth Vader outfit.
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I’ve been at a State Data Center Affiliates meeting Wednesday, Thursday and will be today, learning a lot about the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey. and other Census products. I know the Census people really can’t say this, but I can: if you don’t want some intrusive government person coming to your house, fill out the form and return it right away. The decennial form next year is 10 questions, 10 minutes. Expect me to bore you with this regularly until at least mid-April.
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I TOLD you the Yankees would beat the…Cardinals I TOLD you the Yankees would win the World Series. Didn’t see an inning of it live; mostly caught the highlights.
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I’m really pleased to announce that I received an acceptance letter this week for the proposal I submitted for Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc. 9th annual conference in February. I’ll talk more about it as it gets closer, but I’ve been a big fan of Paul and Mary Liz Stewart’s work on this for years.

ROG

How Sweet the Juice

I love the Internet.


Nearly three years ago, Scott asked me what my favorite book was, and after acknowledging my appreciation for reference books such as the World Almanac and the Joel Whitburn Billboard books, I noted my affection for The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip.

Here’s the Library Journal account of the book, as published on Amazon:
In Haizlip’s dramatic account of her search for her mother’s multiracial family, race is less a matter of genetic endowment than of social and psychological perceptions. Her mother and her mother’s siblings could all pass for white; Haizlip recounts their differing choices with considerable narrative force. The life-long consequences of these decisions, combined with vivid details of her family’s success in claiming position and power in a race-conscious society, and above all, the emotional pain caused by the conflicting perceptions of race, give this account an almost novelistic quality. We learn of Haizlip’s numerous prominent positions in public service and the media. In the final analysis, Haizlip raises the issue of identity itself–who is black and who is white? How do we know, and what does it mean? Highly recommended for all Americans desiring to come to terms with who we are.
– Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch . of Mathematics & Science, Mobile
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

So, I check my e-mail Friday, and who should be writing me but Shirlee Taylor Haizlip! She thanked me for my kudos of her work, and noted that HBO had optioned her three books, for which she is currently working on the screenplay. Then she pointed out this YouTube piece running a (5 minute) interview she did when the book came out.

I watched this and I was reminded that in some fundamental way, race is as complicated in America now as it was 40 years ago when my mother, who is a black woman fair of skin, told this story. She and my father went to a business meeting in San Francisco. Well, OK, the men did, and the wives did other things. At some point, the women were talking about various subjects. The topic segued to race, and the civil rights movement – my mother didn’t bring it there – and one of the women asked, “What do you think, Trudy?” She said, “Well, being a black woman…” Apparently, that was a bit of a shock to the system of her compatriots. But knowing my mother, this was no “gotcha!” moment, but merely an honest response.
I should note that my mother, at that time, was rather fond of wearing a red wig, and it was coiffed but not in an “Afrocentric” way. In the right setting, my mother could have passed, but like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, she had no interest in doing so.

Coincidentally, or probably not, I ran into my friend Mary Liz Stewart at the CVS on Saturday. She and her husband Paul do the Underground Railroad workshops in Albany, and she noted that a woman named Viola Haizlip had help arrange their table at the African American Family Day event this coming Saturday (August 2) at the Empire State Plaza; I’m working the table from noon to 2 pm, though the event runs until 7 pm. Haizlip is not that common a name, and Shirlee confirmed that her husband Harold has family in the Albany area.

In any case, I’ll need to seek out Harold and Shirlee’s book In the Garden of Our Dreams.
ROG

French military victories in the Arabian Gulf

You may recall that Google was, for a time, “fooled”, when typing in miserable failure, into linking to George W. Bush’s biography; now it links to the controversy over that Google bomb.

I have learned recently that the first site that loads on Google when you plug in the term French military victories is a faked Google page offering a “did you mean?” option. Searching for Arabian gulf gives you a site similar to the defused “cannot find weapons of mass destruction” fake IE error page. (Thanks, Amanda from Charleston.)
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Wonder Woman shows that fighting crime is not always easy.

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I went into a comic book store last week and actually bought two items: the Overstreet Price Guide (do people still call it the Overpriced Street Guide?), because my boss has started asking me about prices of old comics; and the magazine Alter Ego (July 2007), featuring a long interview with ’70s Marvel editor, and Alter Ego founder, Roy Thomas. His ascent to editor pretty much corresponded to the time I first started looking at comics again after a large gap when I had “outgrown” them; big-time nostalgia for me, I was surprised to discover.
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There’s a new reality show being developed and I know all about it.
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Numbers lie: I’m loving the Wall Street Journal blog, The Numbers Guy, which I write about here.
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My monthly plug about the Underground Railroad conference here.

Yeah, I’m repositioning my own pieces from my other blogs for this post. Hey, it’s Labor Day weekend; cut me some slack!
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Instead of watching Pedro Martinez’s pitching debut for his beloved Mets, what Fred Hembeck will be viewing (September 2). I’ll be alternating between the Mets and the U.S. Open (tennis), bumped from the local our CBS affiliate by what Fred is watching, but showing up on our CW affiliate.

ROG

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