From:         Patrick Crispen 
Subject:      TOURBUS - 24 MAR 2006 - Unforgotten / PopoZao

TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: UNFORGOTTEN / POPOZAO

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, a Polish mathematician who, in 1932, solved the Enigma machine.

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Unseen. Unforgotten.

In November 2004, while searching through an equipment closet at the Birmingham News, Alexander Cohn discovered a cardboard box labled "Keep. Do Not Sell." The box contained the negatives of some 5,000 photographs taken between 1950 and 1965, including 2,000 photographs that were never published in The News.

Why is this important? Well, most of the pictures were of the United States Civil Rights Movement.

On Sunday, February 26, the Birmingham News published 32 of these photographs in a special, eight page section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten." You can find an Adobe Acrobat version of that section online at

http://www.al.com/unseen/unseen.pdf

The Birmingham News also created a companion web site at

http://www.al.com/unseen/

that contains additional, unpublished photographs and audio interviews about the Civil Rights Movement. [You make be asked to key in your zip code and age in order to see these. If you are outside of the United States, just use the University of Alabama's zip code: 35487.]

As the newspaper of record for central Alabama, the photographers of the Birmingham News were front-and-center to witness and record most of the Civil Rights Movement from the Freedom Riders to the integration of the University of Alabama [my alma mater] to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to civil disobedience to Bull Connor ... and the list goes on. The 2,000 negatives are a time capsule that give us a glimpse into a turbulent and oftentimes shameful period of American history.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

In 2002, Public Broadcasting aired a four-part, Peabody award-winning documentary that looked at American race relations in the 100 years between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. While the documentary is not available online [which is a shame], the series' companion web site is still available at

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/

Jim Crow is a term describing the American racist culture against blacks [and] it originated as a derogatory way of depicting black people in the minstrel shows of early 19th century America. Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice popularized the term by marking his face with burned cork or a charcoal paste (known as black face), dressing in sloppy clothes, and dancing a silly jig while grinning broadly ... By the 1890s, the term had come to mean the separation of blacks from whites and the general customs and laws that subordinated blacks as an inferior people. [Source: http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/ ]

PBS's "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" website offers:

An historical timeline of Jim Crow from 1863 to 1954.

Audio and video narratives, photographs, and rare documents.

Interactive maps.

Tools and activites that show you some of the obstacles

inherent in Jim Crow.

And much more.

If you are interested in learning more about the "why" behind the pictures in the Birmingham News' "Unseen. Unforgiven" collection, you really should visit

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/

Meme Review: Peanut Butter Federline

On a much less serious topic, last week we visited

http://home.comcast.net/~etrata/flash/banana.swf

Remember that. We're going to come back to that in a moment. Well, Britney Spears husband Kevin Federline recently released a dance single titled "PopoZao." You can see a video of Federline in the studio jamming to a playback of PopoZao at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRGoo_k03Tw

Critics were unimpressed with the song, and some enterprising pranksters took it upon themselves to remix Federline's "masterpiece". I don't know about you, but I think the new version is significantly more danceable. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7cAYK9GYHY

Have a safe and happy week, and we'll talk again soon.

           .~~~.  ))
(\__/)  .'     )  ))       Patrick Douglas Crispen
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