'

This is what Guy looked like when I first met him in Yellow Springs, lugging his guitar and a slide carousel.

Guy Carawan has died. I met Guy at Antioch in 1958. He was passing through and had recently returned from a trip to China. I was Activities Director (a student government position) and had a budget and was able to pay him an honorarium and set up a screening of his slides from Mao’s China in the old gym. it was packed. China was a mystery in those days. It was before Lucy Jarvis took NBC there. Even before Felix Greene had made his film or published his books. A slide show from this forbidden territory caused a big stir in middle Ohio. People came from Dayton and even Cincinnati. It was one of my biggest “activities”. 
Guy liked listening to my partner Mahlon’s banjo and took to it like a fish to water. It replaced his guitar as his signature instrument. Guy and me and Alice Foster (Gerrard) and I think it was Joan Goodman crammed into a tiny VW bug and headed south to Highlander one weekend from Yellow springs.
Highlander was a civil rights training center where Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, CT Vivian and many other leaders met and held strategy workshops. I had been there many times while in high school in Chattanooga and wanted to share the experience with my Antioch friends. Guy had been there in 1953 and was anxious to see it again. We had a great time. It wasn’t a workshop weekend, so we spent time listening to Myles Horton telling us mountain stories and helping the cook Dodie shell peas to freeze. And of course Dodie and Guy traded songs. Later that very month Highlander was raided and shut down for “selling liquor without a license” because of the donation can near the six packs in the frig. Grundy Country was dry, even though The University of the South down the road was the drinkingest college in the country. The informer apparently was that same Dodie, the cook. 
As years passed, I saw Guy several times in New York whenever he came for a concert and once I helped him edit a video of a Highlander music workshop, Come All You Coal Miners, which had been shot on reel to reel tape. We edited at EAI at their place on 5th ave. I last saw Guy and Candie, his wife, at the New Market Highlander when I was there for a media activism workshop. Guy leaves many recorded songs, several books (my favorite is “Ain’t you gotta Right to the Tree of Life?”about the Georgia Sea Islands) and a lovely tape by his daughter Heather, The Telling Takes Me Home.
    

Guy Carawan has died. I met Guy at Antioch in 1958. He was passing through and had recently returned from a trip to China. I was Activities Director (a student government position) and had a budget and was able to pay him an honorarium and set up a screening of his slides from Mao’s China in the old gym. it was packed. China was a mystery in those days. It was before Lucy Jarvis took NBC there. Even before Felix Greene had made his film or published his books. A slide show from this forbidden territory caused a big stir in middle Ohio. People came from Dayton and even Cincinnati. It was one of my biggest “activities”.
Guy liked listening to my partner Mahlon’s banjo and took to it like a fish to water. It replaced his guitar as his signature instrument. Guy and me and Alice Foster (Gerrard) and I think it was Joan Goodman crammed into a tiny VW bug and headed south to Highlander one weekend from Yellow springs.
Highlander was a civil rights training center where Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, CT Vivian and many other leaders met and held strategy workshops. I had been there many times while in high school in Chattanooga and wanted to share the experience with my Antioch friends. Guy had been there in 1953 and was anxious to see it again. We had a great time. It wasn’t a workshop weekend, so we spent time listening to Myles Horton telling us mountain stories and helping the cook Dodie shell peas to freeze. And of course Dodie and Guy traded songs. Later that very month Highlander was raided and shut down for “selling liquor without a license” because of the donation can near the six packs in the frig. Grundy Country was dry, even though The University of the South down the road was the drinkingest college in the country. The informer apparently was that same Dodie, the cook.
As years passed, I saw Guy several times in New York whenever he came for a concert and once I helped him edit a video of a Highlander music workshop, Come All You Coal Miners, which had been shot on reel to reel tape. We edited at EAI at their place on 5th ave. I last saw Guy and Candie, his wife, at the New Market Highlander when I was there for a media activism workshop. Guy leaves many recorded songs, several books (my favorite is “Ain’t You Gotta Right to the Tree of Life?”about the Georgia Sea Islands) and a lovely tape by his daughter Heather, The Telling Takes Me Home.

Flag

I voted for Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente.
I never thought I would hang an American flag on my porch.
But when the inauguration started, I had to do something.
When I was in 9th grade I worked in St. Louis in 1954 to desegregate movie theatersas pat of a CORE/NCCJ campaign.
I went to high school in Tennessee where the water fountains at the train station had "Colored Only" signs.
I attended Highlander workshops where civil rights leaders met and strategized on weekends off from high school.
In school we stood up when we sang Dixie at assembly.
The event of the year in Chattanooga was the Cotton Ball where the guys wore Confederate uniforms and the belles wore hoop skirts.

Barack Obama is President of the United States.
I never thought I would see this day.
Watching the crowds fill the Mall, I cried.
Then I rummaged through the blanket chest where this flag was stored. It is made of wool and has 48 stars and lots of moth holes. My parents hung it from our house in Saint Louis every Fourth of July. The only time I ever hung it was for a Paper Tiger show with Conrad Lynn, civil rights activist and lawyer for Puerto Rican Nationalist Don Pedro Albizu Campos.
Albizu Campos went to Harvard too.

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My friend Amina commented:
haha! who'da thunk it
nice that your flag is antique... the only large one I have has 41 holes burned in it and red paint like bloodstains in memory of Amadou Diallo.
The small ones I had were put back on their sticks upside down and last used during the funeral of Shaka Sankofa, outside the US consulate in Amsterdam. Viva Obama!