He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Robert F. Kennedy recited his version of this Aeschylus poem April 4, 1968 at his announcement of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that evening at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was in Memphis to generate empowerment and involvement among poor people of all races, and to demand of the US government a transfer from military spending to human services for the poor. The Poor People’s Campaign was his most controversial to date, and after his assassination, support poured in from around the country. The action commenced this day in 1968 with his organizers in the “King-Abernathy” suite at the Lorraine Motel where King was slain, and in Washington DC.

Five years earlier on May 2, 1963, African American children marched independently in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation. Some were as young as six. They were set upon by white police officers and adult citizens with fire hoses, dogs, and batons. They returned each day to march. Their movement became known as The Children’s Crusade. King was jailed in the city less than a month prior, during which time he had written his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He referred to these protesters as “the disinherited children of God.”

You can visit the Lorraine Motel in Memphis — it is now called the National Civil Rights Museum. A full renovation and strengthening of the museum will be unveiled in summer 2014.

There are songs in the oeuvre of Nina Simone with the power to paralyze. It’s prudent to use some caution, plan ahead, before you listen. Just press play like this was some airy ‘entertainment’ and they can render you useless for the day. The rapturous redemption of My Sweet Lord could evoke the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in the most diehard of agnostics. There’s that part on the studio version of What More Can I Say? when in the throes of a devastating falsetto she messes up a line, but thank heavens kept the take. And then the battle cry at the denouement of Four Women, a brutal invocation in song of four hundred years through the lives of four Black women — “My name is… Peaches.” The very incongruity of it, the unlikeliness that those four words could possess such power, only amplify its thunder. The song ends. And just try to go about your day after that one. “My name is Peaches,” like a lightning bolt through your spine, and you’re left to pick up the pieces. How to tend to the minutiae of a day after that one? But when the lights go out tonight, especially tonight, we’ll listen. Happy 80th birthday, High Priestess.

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” - Dr. Cornel West

If the President of Street Photography can hang, ya’ll need to #StayinLine!

Photo by Humans of New York

Stills from tonight’s screening of Helke Sander’s The All-Around Reduced Personality (1978) at YU in Portland as part of their two month Marianne Wex exhibition.

Born in 1937, Sander founded the Coalition for the Liberation of Women in 1968 and co-founded the women’s group Bread and Roses in 1972. The speech she delivered at a 1968 conference of Socialist German Students, which argued that the students’ movement reflected the sexism of its time, is widely credited as the spark that began the New German Women’s Movement. In 1974, Sander founded Frauen und Film, the first European feminist film journal. This, her first feature-length film, received the Prix de l’Âge d’Or at the Brussels Film Festival in 1978. Helke Sander is still active making films, writing, and teaching.

The screening is this evening at 7, and the exhibition is on show until December 15. Get ye!

The Colorado River has been the misused lover of many a mining corporation and troubled politician — but beauty always has a way of gracing even the most violent and unfortunate human offenses. It’s uncomfortable and comforting and discomfiting and sort of otherworldly when it does. Here, an aerial view, from Boulder photographer Jesse Varner, of evaporation ponds at the Potash Plant near Moab, Utah. Salts are mined and pumped up from deep below the surface, and the solution is concentrated in these evaporation ponds for extraction as a chemical fertilizer.

Mr. Means cut off his braids a few months before receiving his cancer diagnosis. It was, he said in an interview last October, a gesture of mourning for his people. In Lakota lore, he explained, the hair holds memories, and mourners often cut it to release those memories, and the people in them, to the spirit world.