Post by ronprice on Aug 10, 2005 10:27:49 GMT -5
THE TABLES KEEP TURNING 
At Ridvan 1964 I was just finishing my final exams at McMaster University in a first year BA(Arts) course. That month, in April 1964, a civil rights project was announced for Mississippi, sponsored by a number of organizations concerned with racial issues. The aim was to get Negroes on the voting lists. On June 21st 1964 three civil rights workers were killed by the Klu Klux Klan and an FBI investigation began to bring Klan members to justice, an investigation which only ended last month on June 23rd 2005. Several Klan members were imprisoned; many Negroes were killed and it took more than 40 years to bring one of the killers to justice.
A heavily fictionalized melodrama about the 1964 murder of these civil rights workers was screened in 1988. By that time I was 43 and living in Perth Western Australia. The film was called Mississippi Burning.
At the beginning of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, in the years just before my parents first met, Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces offered one of the best explanations of southern prejudice and the injustices the film Mississippi Burning was concerned with. In that book Caldwell explains the origins of despair in the white community of the southern USA and how the whites directed their resentment and despair on the Negro as scapegoat. Whites coped with their own suffering by watching the suffering of the Negro. Shoghi Effendi commented on this attitude to the Negro and its potentially tragic consequences ten years before in 1954.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, “To The American Baha’is…,” Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.126 and Southern Cross TV, “Mississippi Burning,” 11:30 p.m.-2:00 a.m., July 17/18, 2005.
The tenth stage of history had just dawned
and what was called, then, a Nine Year Plan.1
I was just finishing 1st year uni exams at the time
as we entered another battle, one I hardly knew,
fighting my own, slightly below hypomanic,
on my way to depression, to history and philosophy
by summer’s end; living outside London and then
in Hamilton as the Freedom Summer hotted up
in Mississippi grabbing the headlines as I was trying
to grab an attractive country girl but with no luck.
The jobs that summer brought work about half the time.
The Beatles went from strength to strength
and the most indulged generation1 in history
kept turning the tables on an orthodoxy
that was in its last years in this first century
of the tenth and last stage of history.
1 Doris Lessing said(SBS TV, 18/9/’00) “the sixties generation, those who came of age in the sixties, were the most indulged generation in history.”
1 April 21st 1964.
Ron Price
July 18th 2005
At Ridvan 1964 I was just finishing my final exams at McMaster University in a first year BA(Arts) course. That month, in April 1964, a civil rights project was announced for Mississippi, sponsored by a number of organizations concerned with racial issues. The aim was to get Negroes on the voting lists. On June 21st 1964 three civil rights workers were killed by the Klu Klux Klan and an FBI investigation began to bring Klan members to justice, an investigation which only ended last month on June 23rd 2005. Several Klan members were imprisoned; many Negroes were killed and it took more than 40 years to bring one of the killers to justice.
A heavily fictionalized melodrama about the 1964 murder of these civil rights workers was screened in 1988. By that time I was 43 and living in Perth Western Australia. The film was called Mississippi Burning.
At the beginning of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, in the years just before my parents first met, Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces offered one of the best explanations of southern prejudice and the injustices the film Mississippi Burning was concerned with. In that book Caldwell explains the origins of despair in the white community of the southern USA and how the whites directed their resentment and despair on the Negro as scapegoat. Whites coped with their own suffering by watching the suffering of the Negro. Shoghi Effendi commented on this attitude to the Negro and its potentially tragic consequences ten years before in 1954.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, “To The American Baha’is…,” Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.126 and Southern Cross TV, “Mississippi Burning,” 11:30 p.m.-2:00 a.m., July 17/18, 2005.
The tenth stage of history had just dawned
and what was called, then, a Nine Year Plan.1
I was just finishing 1st year uni exams at the time
as we entered another battle, one I hardly knew,
fighting my own, slightly below hypomanic,
on my way to depression, to history and philosophy
by summer’s end; living outside London and then
in Hamilton as the Freedom Summer hotted up
in Mississippi grabbing the headlines as I was trying
to grab an attractive country girl but with no luck.
The jobs that summer brought work about half the time.
The Beatles went from strength to strength
and the most indulged generation1 in history
kept turning the tables on an orthodoxy
that was in its last years in this first century
of the tenth and last stage of history.
1 Doris Lessing said(SBS TV, 18/9/’00) “the sixties generation, those who came of age in the sixties, were the most indulged generation in history.”
1 April 21st 1964.
Ron Price
July 18th 2005
