Rest in Peace, Mildred Loving
Mildred Loving, the surviving half of the interracial couple whose challenge to laws banning interracial marriage led to the Supreme Court to put an end to that nonsense, died on Friday. Loving and her...
View ArticleLittle bit o’ pressure
Almost two years ago now, I started working on a novel of historical fiction. I spent the first year caught up in “research rapture” to cop a phrase from writer/editor Janis Cooke Newman…that phase...
View ArticleSo this was, ahem, unexpected
In March I went to DC on a research trip and spent hours at Cedar Hill, the home in Anacostia in which Frederick and Helen Douglass lived. Helen spent the last part of her life fighting to have the...
View ArticleSo many authors, so little time
We’re about halfway through San Francisco’s annual “Litquake” festival and I am spoiled by choice. This is such a literary town; you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a memoirist. So when I took a...
View ArticleWatch Night 2008
I’m reading Giants, by John Stauffer – subtitled “The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.” It’s beautifully researched and written and, you know, right up my alley. With only 6...
View ArticleMy Frederick Douglass photo in a textbook
I got a great surprise in the mail today – a new textbook from Enslow Publishing on Frederick Douglass, featuring a photo I took of his gravestone during one of my Rochester visits. (He’s buried in...
View ArticleIf you think politics are disdainful now…
A couple of months ago my friend Maria of Sweet Thursday fame brought me a book she’d found at the Lafayette Library’s used bookstore. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the...
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