"As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it."

Photo credit goes to J. Tyler Franklin, at WFPL's 2019 series on toxic air pollution in Louisville.

You can almost hear the rejoinder: "Well, if it's dangerous, move ... but not into OUR neighborhood, of course."

Pollution in Black neighborhoods part of Louisville's systemic racism, by John Hans Gilderbloom, Gregory D. Squires, Robert P. Friedland and Dwan Turner (Courier Journal)

Thousands of Black and white protesters got a taste recently of what it is like to feel the agony of being gassed by the police. It was painful, sickening and scary.

But citizens in western Louisville are regularly “gassed,” causing long-term health problems. The mayor’s own office admits this truth, with people dying an average of 10 years earlier in western Louisville compared to the rest of the city. In some neighborhoods, the life span is less than in war-torn Iraq according to Louisville’s Health Department.

In other words, 60,000 folks (enough to fill Cardinal Stadium) are dying prematurely and most of them are African Americans. As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it. Western Louisville’s air, water and soil are so toxic and rank among the worst of any American city. It is unlivable for a modern American neighborhood ...

snip

The calls for greater equity also means cleaning up the air, water and soil. Poor people needlessly suffer more here than the same low-income people in West Coast cites. If we adopted the same tough, environmental regulations as our West Coast counterparts, western Louisville would surely bloom.

The unfairness between black and white neighborhoods is stark and vivid. As the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, once said: "everyone hungers for a first class neighborhood for both pride and dignity ... nobody wants a second class neighborhood." First class neighborhoods are safe, healthy, sustainable, and prosperous. It is a human right, an American right.

"Russell: What is the Right to Remain?": Root Cause Research Center's series is about Louisville, but it might as well be addressing New Albany, too.

Because: Jeff Gahan didn't pull his public housing putsch idea from the passive ether. He copied it from the progressive-pretend playbook of his political idol, Greg Fischer (current backer of Mike Bloomberg, which pretty much says it all about Fischer's enduring cluelessness).

Sound familiar, nominal Democrats of New Albany?: "How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city."

Earlier tonight I read the first three installments in the Root Cause Research Center's series about Louisville's Russell neighborhood. I recommend you do the same -- and don't forget this coming event.

The Root Cause Research Center and Actor's Theatre are bringing Ananya Roy to speak on "Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City."

I know, I know; a day at Recbar 812 is so much more fun. But these topics are reality, and it you're serious about getting to the heart of the matter, it might just require deeper understanding than comic book movies and Facebook memes.

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Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 1
“African Americans experience homeownership in ways that rarely produce the financial benefits typically enjoyed by middle-class white Americans... The real estate market is so structured by race that Black families will never come out ahead." - Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor from Race For Profit

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 2
Louisville wins at the expense of vulnerable black communities: How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city.

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 3
Housing, neoliberalism, and financialization: What REALLY happens when the private sector controls public assets.

Progress, indeed: "An organic effort by black millennials and Gen Z-ers to influence older family members against Mr. Biden."

The parody site still appears first.

Meanwhile the enduring mystery in New Albany pertains to the ruling Democratic Party's failure over a period of decades to empower the African-American community. There has been lots of platitudes and a few higher ranking political patronage positions, but no real commitment.

Would the situation improve under a Republican administration? Maybe, maybe not, although it couldn't possibly be any more cynical than it is now. After all, when we refer to them as the DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party, reality comes perilously close to negating the satire. 

Young Black Voters to Their Biden-Supporting Parents: ‘Is This Your King?’ by Astead W. Herndon (New York Times)

An organic effort by black millennials and Gen Z-ers to influence older family members against Mr. Biden may be important in the Democratic primary.

... But if (Biden) is to be overtaken by one of his more progressive rivals, the most powerful tool against him may not be opposition research or negative advertisements. Instead, it may be an organic effort by younger black voters — concerned about Mr. Biden’s age and more moderate ideology — to sway their older family members.

Ballparks, too -- or "Preserving the Legacy of Black Baseball in Detroit’s Hamtramck Stadium."

Street view, Google map.

Ever since the old baseball parks began coming down in the 1960s and 1970s, even when I was very young and knew little about the world, I've been wondering why the notion of historic preservation didn't extend to them, too. Shouldn't Wrigley Field and Fenway Park be National Historic Parks? 

Preserving the Legacy of Black Baseball in Detroit’s Hamtramck Stadium, by Anna Clark (CityLab)

An effort to restore one of the last remaining Negro League ballparks uncovers a hidden history of America’s pastime.

Only a few are left.

Negro League ballparks were a vibrant centerpiece of African-American life in the early 20th century, when black people were banished from the major leagues. Their venues read like a map of the Great Migration: at one end, places like Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Hot Springs, Arkansas; at the other, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland.

It’s taken more than a century, but the historic-preservation movement is finally reaching this neglected part of the cultural landscape. And it’s about time: By one measure, only five still stand.

They include Hamtramck Stadium, where the Detroit Stars played. After sitting as essentially a vacant lot for two decades, it’s gotten a big restoration push recently from local champions of baseball history, family members of a former star player, and also, of all people, Jack White. The rescue campaign interrupts the pattern of preservation tending to favor the structures built by dominant wealthy white people, a pattern that presents a distorted view of the past.

The field and remaining wooden grandstand are in Veterans Memorial Park in Hamtramck, Michigan—a small, dense, and famously diverse community that is bordered on almost all four sides by Detroit. As the home field of the Stars, many of the league’s shining lights played here, including Satchel Page and Josh Gibson. Turkey Stearnes, the Stars’ center fielder and an intimidating left-handed batter, is one of the best to ever play the game. Altogether, 18 people who played at Hamtramck Stadium are in the Baseball Hall of Fame, including Stearnes ...

The good news is that our local contingent of historic preservationists was ahead of the curve as it pertained to saving African-American history; the restored Division Street school is something we all can be proud was restored.

The bad news is that especially since last year's Reisz Mahal shenanigans, these same preservationists have allowed their leadership to over-reach, binding them to the specific political aspirations of a power-hungry dullard of a mayor. It's too bad, but at least we have the chance to fix it -- by firing the mayor.

What are the other "black-history sites" in New Albany?

Some might say the Hartman House on State, currently being remodeled as part of the Reisz Mahal fix; after all, the house was a black-owned funeral parlor for decades until relatively recently. This one is complicated, though, as the original owner Mr. Hartman was a German immigrant, albeit uncharacteristically helpful to the African-American community.

Balance in the cultural landscape? I'm for it.

 ... Brent Leggs is the director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a campaign launched in November 2017 in the wake of violent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia. The plan: to help preserve 150 black-history sites, and in doing so, to bring balance and depth to how the American story is told in our cultural landscape.

By preserving the tangible evidence of the past, Leggs says, “we allow the public an opportunity to interact and engage with these complex and rich stories in American history.”

Even as the preservation movement in recent years has been working to be more inclusive, he says, traditionally, preservationists have favored the structures associated with wealth and whiteness: the homes of famous industrialists, say, and former presidents. Leggs cites numbers that, in his view, underscore the significant gaps in resources to preserve these places: In the last 15 months, the fund received 1,000-plus proposals from nearly every state, requesting a total of $140 million dollars. “That affirms that African-American historic places are underfunded and undervalued,” he says.

Hamtramck Stadium was built on a former lumberyard ...

"Walking While Black": If you think car-centrism sucks, welcome to pedestrian racial profiling.

We've been here before.

Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.

But this one's a whole different twist on the prevailing inanity.

Walking While Black, by Topher Sanders and Kate Rabinowitz, ProPublica, and Benjamin Conarck, Florida Times-Union

Jacksonville’s enforcement of pedestrian violations raises concerns that it’s another example of racial profiling.

THE JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF’S OFFICE issues hundreds of pedestrian citations a year, drawing on an array of 28 separate statutes governing how people get around on foot in Florida’s most populous city. There is, of course, the straightforward jaywalking statute, barring people from crossing against a red light. But in Jacksonville, pedestrians can also be ticketed for crossing against a yellow light, for “failing to cross a street at a right angle,” for not walking on the left side of a road when there are no sidewalks, or alternatively for not walking on a sidewalk when one is available.

The sheriff’s office says the enforcement of the full variety of pedestrian statutes is essential to keeping people alive in a city with one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the nation. The office also says the tickets are a useful crime-fighting tool, allowing officers to stop suspicious people and question them for guns and or drugs.

However, a ProPublica/Florida Times-Union analysis of five years of pedestrian tickets shows there is no strong relationship between where tickets are being issued and where people are being killed. The number of fatal crashes involving pedestrians, in fact, climbed every year from 2012 to 2016, the most recent years for which complete data is available.

What the analysis does show is that the pedestrian tickets — typically costing $65, but carrying the power to damage one’s credit or suspend a driver’s license if unpaid — were disproportionately issued to blacks, almost all of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the last five years, blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only accounting for 29 percent of the population. Blacks account for a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida.

Blacks, then, were nearly three times as likely as whites to be ticketed for a pedestrian violation. Residents of the city’s three poorest zip codes were about six times as likely to receive a pedestrian citation as those living in the city’s other, more affluent 34 zip codes.

Tickets for some of the less familiar statutes were issued even more disproportionately to blacks. Seventy-eight percent of all tickets written for “walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided” were issued to blacks. As well, blacks accounted for 68 percent of all recipients of tickets issued for “failing to cross the road at a right angle or shortest route” ...

Henry Bain's New Albany: Finally, a genuine Bicentennial triumph.

We caught the Sunday afternoon matinee of Henry Bain's New Albany, as performed at St. Mark's. As I strongly suspected going in, the play is an undisputed high point of the "paint by numbers in shades of muted beige" bicentennial celebration we've been forced to endure in 2013.

It's worth noting that in Larry Muhammad's script, African-American characters in the year 1913 find themselves excluded from the centennial planning process, and respond by devising their own civic birthday celebration.

Was the committee of officious commissars in 2013 any more representative than those of 1913? Judge for yourself. The current century's insular group of civic pillars arguably includes more women and African-Americans, but its special bureaucratic talent has been the exclusion en masse of differing ideas and their troublesome bearers.

Seeing as NAC persists in dating New Albany's founding not from the arrival of the Scribners, but the town's legal incorporation in 1817, this means we have ample time to plan The Peoples Bicentennial, to be observed in 2017. Meanwhile, here's a snippet from the play ...

Great Day Live Video: "Henry Bain's New Albany"(WHAS)

 ... and one recipe for mimicking the famous Henry Bain sauce.

Henry Bain sauce is a sweet-sour-spicy beef sauce invented by a maitre d' at Louisville's all-male Pendennis Club in the early 20th century.

· 1 (17-ounce) jar Major Grey's chutney
· 1/2 of 9-ounce jar imported pickled walnuts (optional, see note)
· 1 (14-ounce) bottle ketchup
· 1 (11-ounce) bottle A-1 Steak Sauce
· 1 (10-ounce) bottle Worcestershire sauce
· 1 (12-ounce) bottle chili sauce
· Tabasco, to taste

Put the chutney and walnuts, if using, in a blender and chop fine or puree as you prefer (you'll need to stop and stir). Combine with other ingredients and season to taste with Tabasco.

Makes 4 pints.

Serve with hot or cold roast beef. Spread on beef sandwiches, serve with pot roast, etc. Also good served with cream cheese as a cracker spread.

Note: Pickled walnuts are recommended in the Henry Bain sauce recipe in``The Farmington Cookbook,'' but not in recipes written by former Louisville food writers Cissy Gregg and Marion Flexner.

Six hours?

Some sobering and fascinating numbers herein.

When Buying Local Doesn't Build Community Wealth, by Amy Cortese (Locavesting)

Buy local. Support local business. These are the rallying cries that community-boosters (including myself) use all the time. When you spend money at a local business, the theory goes, more of that money circulates in the community, supporting other local businesses as well as charities and boosting the local tax base.

Except when it doesn't.