“Oh, boy! Oh, Boy!
I love ice cream!
Wait! Piggie loves ice cream, too!
Piggie is my best friend. 
Should I share my ice cream with her?
Should I share my 
awesome,
yummy,
sweet,
super,
great,
tasty,
nice, 
cool ice cream?
hmmm…mmm…mmmMMM…”
                              from Should I Share My Ice Cream?
                                        an Elephant and Piggie Book
                              written and illustrated by Mo Willems
                                 Hyperion Books for Children, 2011
                                read on YouTube by AHEV Library
                                               accessed 8/23/2020

    I love ice cream. As much as Mo Willems’s Elephant, I’m sure. Probably as much as anyone. Maybe more.
    Mom always kept ice cream in the freezer at home. Dad loved chocolate. Mom was vanilla, all the way. She liked White House, the kind with the cherries in it. I’m sorry to say, I don’t know my sister’s favorite, or my brother’s. True to my child-self, I mostly cared about my own choices, doused with chocolate syrup when I could get it.
    One day we kids heard a calliope-sounding jingle getting louder and louder. We ran outside. An ice cream truck was cruising our neighborhood, passing by as slowly as possible, right in time for a snack for the very lucky neighborhood kids. 
    But not us. Never us. Our ice cream was in the freezer. 
    Mom kept cones on hand, too. The pointy ones. She’d make us cones and let us eat outside, but it wasn’t the same, at least not for me.
    I’m not sure what thoughts Mom had about kids who ran into the street after a slow-moving vehicle ready to thrust quarters at the white-suited driver. It wasn’t a good look for her, though. Besides, why should we spend our money on an inferior product when a better substitute was right there in our freezer?
    Well, to be like the other kids, Mom. 
    She finally gave in. I decided on a drumstick. I ripped off the paper, which was in itself a novelty, and discovered perfectly shaped ice cream extending past the cone for probably 2 full inches, chocolate-dipped and flat-topped. But, it was frozen custard, not real ice cream. And the cone was soggy. Mom was right again.
    But, whether we bought the ice cream or not, whether we liked it or not so much, the jingle stayed with us for the rest of the day. 
    I can conjure it up, still. “Turkey in the Straw.”
    Who knew the tune had racist overtones? Not me. Not The Good Humor Company, started 100 years ago, right here in Youngstown, Ohio, when Henry Burt created a chocolate coating that would stay on the ice cream. When his young daughter said it was good but too messy to eat, he froze it onto a stick and a new confection was born.
    Since 1920, Good Humor treats have been sold out of everything from tricycles to push carts to trucks.    
    By 1936, Good Humor men went through a rigorous three-day training program. In 1960, the company sold over 85 different products. 
    But times change. The fleet of trucks was sold in 1976, when the company focused on marketing to grocery stores. The trucks went for $1,000 to $3,000 each. Some were bought by ice cream distributers, and some were sold to individuals.
    And the iconic song went with them.
    When the tune was originated early in the 1800s from British and Irish folksongs, it had no racist overtones. That addition came soon after, when it was performed in the United States in minstrel shows. Some songs were sung with the same melody, but highly offensive lyrics, performed in black-face. 
    The short re-cap below is from American Heritage: https://www.americanheritage.com/blackface-sad-history-minstrel-shows itself the reprint of a 1978 article.
    Begun with the creation in 1828, of a character named “Jim Crow,” White performer, Thomas Rice became an American sensation. He blackened his face and reddened his lips to present the caricature that quickly became an ingrained stereotype. 
    More popular in the North than the South, and more popular in cities than rural areas, the song and dance of the minstrel shows actually did allow Black performers to “break into” show business. The problem, though, to be successful, they too had to carry on the charade of the stereotype. What image does Stepin Fetchit conjure for you? I know. Me, too, and I’ve never seen his films. 
    But these shows are part of our history. The songs became popular, lurid and derisive lyrics and all, perpetuating a cruel satire and exploitation. The shows were meant to be light and meaningless entertainment, but were in truth, so much more.
    The entertainment was lively, fresh, and complex. It drew on original music, dance, and one-liners. But the extremely popular shows depended on portraying enslaved people as “happy, dancing, carefree children for whom life was a continual frolic.” The message of the show, that Blacks could only “succeed” in the confines of an enslaved life and cared for by a kind master and mistress was not lost on anyone.
    By the twentieth century, our had country moved on to concerns other than slavery, and the minstrel show faded. Left behind, though, was the stereotype that Black people could not survive in the complex society of urban life.
    And the songs. 
    The racist lyrics were lost to most of us leaving only the calliope jingle on an ice cream truck. Now that has finally changed, too. Good Humor recently engaged RZA to create a new melody for a new time. He did. Here’s about a minute and a half of RZA’s explanation with the new jingle in the background.   https://www.goodhumor.com/us/en/jingle.html 
    Finally, scroll down to find Good Humor’s statement on its commitment to racial equality and racial justice.
                                    -—stay curious! (and eat ice cream)   

…After the Civil Rights came the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act would become the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America.
                          from: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You
                                              written by Jason Reynolds
                                      Little, Brown and Company, 2020
                                      (Adapted from the National Book
                          Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning 
                                                        by Ibram X. Kendi)

    Suffrage: The word is an old one. It’s from the Old French sofrage “plea, intercession” and comes directly from the medieval Latin suffragium “support, ballot, vote; right of voting; a voting tablet.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/suffrage 
    The word’s first usage as “the political right to vote” is found in the U. S. Constitution, 1787 (same source as above). 
    It is not related to sufferage which is not even a word, even though I want it to mean the noun-form of suffer. 
    Susan B. Anthony was not the only suffragist, then called the diminutive suffragette to belittle and demean those on whose shoulders we all stand, men and women alike. You probably know she was joined by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke, sisters who were outspoken abolitionists. Here are some others you may know.
    Jane Addams won the 1931 Nobel Prize for Peace. 
    Amelia Bloomer wore pants. The word bloomers was coined in her honor. 
    Molly Brown was an actress who survived the Titanic.
    William Jennings Bryan was a newspaperman and orator.
    Julia Ward Howe wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 
    Alice Paul introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, right after Woman’s Suffrage was granted.
    Lucy Stone studied Hebrew and Greek in college to find out if passages in the Bible were translated properly. She looked for “evidence” that stated a man’s dominion over a woman. You can find an interesting and long international list at https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-suffragists-2058290 
    Lots of Black suffragists were important to women getting the vote, too. I never learned that in school. Besides Sojourner Truth (Isabella Van Wagener), here are a few important women I never heard of.
    Mary Ann Shadd Cary studied law at Howard University. She graduated in 1883, and became one of the first black female lawyers in the country. 
    Marry Church Terrell attended Oberlin College as a young woman where she became one of the first African American women to earn a college degree.
    Nannie Helen Burroughs worked with Marry Church Terrell to found the National Association of Colored Women.
    Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born into slavery, became a journalist who spoke out against lynching.
    Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the first popularizers of African American protest poetry, she focused on issues of slavery, gender, and racial discrimination.    
    While many of these passionate women and men did not live to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, one who did was Carrie Chapman Catt. Ahead of the vote, she swung through Nashville encouraging support for Women’s Suffrage. 
    The Amendment had been approved by the Senate (25-4) and now went to a divided House of Representatives. When the final vote was taken, a Representative from Tennessee, Harry T. Burn, surprised everyone by voting “aye.” When asked what moved him to change his position, he said he received a letter from his mother. Dear Son, it read, …don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification. She signed it, Your Mother. Representative Burns went on to add, “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
    Exactly one hundred years ago today, August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. Finally, women could vote legally in all elections throughout the United States.
    Mom told me Gram marched for women’s suffrage. My great-grandma arrived in Baltimore in 1906, with her with bundle of belongings from the Old Country and my three-year-old grandmother in tow. Gram joined her husband who she married in Belarus, but she was nothing if not independent. 
    By the time I came on the scene decades later, Gram’s demonstrating days were behind her. I felt determined and proud, though, as I imagined my own young face superimposed on hers. 
    Gram knew her mind. She knew what was right. She tied up her oxfords and marched for the freedom and responsibility that propelled her decision to cross an ocean. 
                                             -—stay curious! (and vote) 

A note on my post on the Post Office (7/28/2020): I hope I did not mislead anyone to think Louis DeJoy is a good guy. His is not. The post office is a public service and its employees are civil servants. They have a civic mandate central to American business, society, and civic culture. The USPS is a vital part of our government, ensuring communication free from censorship, timely delivery of medicine and medical supplies, and dependable shipments of everything from frivolous wants to significant necessities.

I was feeling a little overwhelmed this past week and decided to take the day off.
​Please look for me here next week.
In the meantime, take care of yourselves and each other.
                                       -—stay curious! (and breathe deeply)

    The legendary Lincoln is known as Honest Abe, a humble man of the people who rose from a log cabin to the White House.
                                       …
    Lincoln may have seemed like a common man, but he wasn’t. … By the time he ran for president he was a wealthy man, earning a large income from his law practice and his many investments. … [And n]o one who knew him well ever called him Abe to his face. They addressed him as Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln.
                                   from:  Lincoln: a Photobiography
                                        written by Russell Freedman
                                    HMH Books/Clarion Books, 1987
                                        1988 Newbery Medal Winner
                             e-book accessed on Libby 7/28/2020

    Before the Civil War, our country had divided itself into political parties based on ideology, but on March 20, 1854, a group of vocal anti-slavery Whig Party members (Abraham Lincoln was a Whig) met in Wisconsin to break away and form a new party. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, proposed to dissolve the terms of the Missouri Compromise and permit existing and new territories to decide for themselves whether or not to allow ownership of enslaved people. Because these Whigs opposed institutional slavery, their faction disintegrated and gave birth to the Republican Party. Their anti-slavery stance aligned with Lincoln’s values. He joined that new Republican Party.
    Membership grew quickly in the Northern states. 
    By 1860, most of the Southern slave-holding states publicly threatened secession if a Republican won the presidency. Abraham Lincoln was elected in November, 1860, and South Carolina announced its secession from the United States just six weeks later. A few months after that, on April 12, 1861, Lincoln ordered Union troops to resupply Fort Sumter, a Union fort in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard and his shore batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter to prevent the resupply. The Civil War had begun. 
    The war cost more lives than any other war we have fought, before or since. According to battlefields.org,  the complicated work of compiling casualties includes counting those who gave their very lives in battle and those whose lives were lost to disease, starvation, capture, or becoming missing in action. The number also includes the wounded, some of whom died of their wounds. The unfathomable number is estimated at 620,000 soldiers, a full 2% of the population at the time. 
    Lincoln knew that fighting the Civil War was the only way to preserve our whole nation. He was ever mindful, though, of the human lives lost and damaged by the War. At Gettysburg he implored us to remember those who had given their “last full measure of devotion” to preserving this great country. At the end of the War, he urged the nation to “bind up our wounds” and move forward together. Lincoln took this war to heart, maybe more than most.
    When John Wilkes Booth took aim and shot his gun shouting “Sic semper tyrannis! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” Lincoln joined those who gave their “last full measure of devotion.”
    We are at another divisive crossroads. We are living in a time of great moral crisis, economic crisis, and health crisis which are all having the collective effect of making us despised and denigrated on the world stage.
    And so the Lincoln Project was formed.
    Prominent and wealthy Republicans have gotten together to form a group who claims they will stop at nothing to defeat Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election. See who they are at https://www.lincolnproject.us   (click the menu and choose “Our Team.”)
    In a New York Times op-ed published December 17, 2019, the Lincoln Project announced itself. You can read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/opinion/lincoln-project.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytopinion 
    Or, in case you didn’t use the link, here’s the gist of it. The Founding members of the Lincoln Project call out Trump’s “crimes, corruption, and corrosive nature.” The Project’s effort “transcends partisanship . . . and asks all Americans to [restore] . . . leadership, governance, and respect for the rules of law.”
    In his Gettysburg Address, four months after the pivotal battle, Lincoln “stood on that fateful field and said, ‘It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
    That “unfinished” but “nobly advanced” work is the inspiration for the Lincoln Project. Lincoln “understood the necessity of not just saving the Union but also of knitting it back together spiritually as well as politically.” 
    Those in the Lincoln Project are “dedicated to defeating Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box . . .” and imply that they favor down-ballot Democratic candidates, too.
    Although they are still Republicans and hold Republican ideas such as pro-business, pro-state’s rights, pro-small government, they understand the severe damage Trump is doing to our country and are trying to make him (and it) stop. They have produced and aired several ads promoting their ideas and their rationale for their important work. In case you haven’t seen them, yet, go to their website. They are all posted there.
    Once more from the Lincoln Project, “Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.”
    I, for one, heartily agree.
                                             -—stay curious! (and vote)