Clint Eastwood talking to MICHAEL JUDGE:
'..."Growing up I was always rooting for the jazz musician," he says. "I remember I was disturbed when there was a big objection to Nat King Cole moving into Hancock Park in Los Angeles. I didn't know Hancock Park at that time, because I was just a kid in Oakland. But I always thought: 'God, who wouldn't want to have Nat Cole living next to him?' Not only because he was a popular guy, but he was one of those few popular guys who was a great jazz player as well, a great piano player."...
"It was a disgraceful time," Mr. Eastwood says. "I remember living through it. You had to have all-white bands or all-black bands or they'd send you away. Woody Herman and Ernie Royal had an occasional mixture. But by and large you couldn't play certain places . . . especially in the South, but across the whole country, really."... '
(WSJ, Feb 22 2011)
I read something startling last year.
JOHN STAUFFER:
"On the eve of the Civil War, Southern slaves were the nation's most valuable commodity. They constituted 80% of the gross national product, equivalent to roughly $10 trillion today. Before the war, America's richest tycoons were not Northern industrialists but Southern planters."
(WSJ, MARCH 26, 2010)
I had not come across them as a balance sheet item yet!
Stock options? Yes. (Read: No wonder they were given as stock options!)
Is it possible that India's Dalits- who were treated in their own country as badly as the blacks in US- too were the nation's most valuable resource around 1860?
Artist: Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, May 7 1927African-Americans might have looked alike to some but they were- and are- very precious.
Imagine Jazz, comedy, cinema, television, sports and Satyagraha of 20th century without African-Americans.
Just read your blog, and started thinking. Its interesting how Dalit movement has been different across India. In Maharashtra probably it was the Warkari Sect that started it and later taken up by Phule and later Ambedkar, in Bengal probably the Bramho Samaj, in South probably Periyar. In many ways North was probably the only place where the Dalits did not have a very strong voice.
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