Gerald Early
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Articles by Gerald Early
The Revolution Will Be Televised as a Baseball Game in New York
Before he became the celebrated columnist who chronicled the tumult of the 1960s through the lens of a working-class New Yorker, Jimmy Breslin was a sportswriter. While reporting for the New York Journal-American and later freelancing for magazines, his milieu was stinky stables and sweaty locker rooms, populated by weather-beaten horse trainers and weaselly bookies. In 1962 Breslin turned to the New York Mets. “Worst Baseball Team Ever,” proclaimed the title of his piece in Sports Illustrated.
Baseball, Battlefields, and the Beginnings of Cold War America
1. “Winning isn’t everything. . .” “In war, there is no substitute for victory,” General Douglas MacArthur famously said before a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951.
How Super Is “Supergirl”?
Supergirl • Screenplay by Ana Nogueira • Based on characters created by Otto Binder & Al Plastino • Directed by Craig Gillespie • Starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet, David Krumholtz, Jason Momoa, and Mathias Schoenaerts • DC Studios, Troll Court Entertainment, and The Safran Company • 108 minutes • Released 26 June 2026 1. Flying high In the pantheon of onscreen Supergirls, Milly Alcock runs (or flies) with the pack as well as anybody ever has.
‘Coltrane’ Review: Sound and Spirit
In 1957 Miles Davis fired his saxophonist, a rambling, unconcise and anxious player of poorly finished solos whose drug addiction was interfering with his performance. A year later, after a stint with Thelonious Monk’s pioneering group, the saxophonist returned to Davis’s quintet and eventually played, with great credit, on Davis’s legendary 1959 album, “Kind of Blue.” By the time John Coltrane left the quintet for the second and final time, in 1960, he was a rising star.
‘Coltrane’ Review: Sound and Spirit
The jazz legend Joni Mitchell never believed was a great: “There’s no comparison” Joni Mitchell grew out of rock and roll long before it was popular to do so. Even though she loved the idea of having the same kind of audience …
James Merrill: The Poetics of Place
One can, of course, judge a work of art on its own terms, carefully setting aside the life of its creator, with its cascading influences of love, pain, or situation. But for me, there is something rich and compelling about imagining what WashU Libraries just showed us: “James Merrill’s Poetic Places.” The exhibition is now over, but the centennial celebration of Merrill’s birth continues.
The Making of a Black Role Model
1. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you Black baby boomers, born, say, between 1945 and 1955, remember Jayne Kennedy well. She was the crossover Black beauty of the age. Before Vanessa Williams won the Miss America title in 1984, there was Jayne Kennedy. She was the first Black woman to win a state beauty pageant when she was crowned Miss Ohio in 1970.
The Lessons America Has Taught Me
1. Beverly, New Jersey The grave markers of Henry Early Jr and his wife, Florence, Beverly National Cemetery, New Jersey. (Photo by Gerald Early) My parents are buried at Beverly National Cemetery, a short drive from Philadelphia. My father, Henry Early Jr., is buried there because he served in the United States Army during World War II. He died in January 1953 at the age of 32 from a brain aneurysm, untimely, to be sure. He was not a particularly good soldier.
How, After World War II, Vietnam Became the Graveyard of Empires
Skip to content That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. —George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” In his January 20, 1961, Inaugural Address, John F. Kennedy declaimed, “To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.
The Man of Tomorrow, a Creation of Yesterday, Meets Us Today
Skip to content The funny thing is, Jim Lee, who’s the famous artist and runs DC Comics, and I are both from St. Louis, Missouri. Jim’s a couple of years older than me, but we both saw [Richard Donner’s] Superman in the same theater in St. Louis, probably a day apart, maybe the same day. And we’re both these little kids from St. Louis, and now look what we’re doing.
William F. Buckley, Grand Impresario of American Conservatism
Skip to content Conservative critiques of President Donald Trump often center on the premise that he has coarsened the rhetoric and made the party less tolerant. These writers often long for the days when the movement was led by more high-minded individuals who expressed their views with greater erudition and were less mean-spirited. The life and work of William F. Buckley Jr. is often cited as an example of their beau ideal.
Miles Davis at 100
“Coleman Hawkins told me never to play with someone older than me, and I never have.” —Miles Davis, 1978 I. The Roar of the Greasepaint Of course, this is not quite true. Trumpeter Miles Davis began his professional career—with musicians who mattered in making him a national figure—in July 1944 at the age of 18 playing with the Billy Eckstine band at St. Louis’ Club Riviera. “So I got on the bandstand,” Davis said, “and started playing, I was third trumpet.
AI and the Inhabited Body
Marty, who tells me he works “in the tradition of pinup art,” but whom I would call a very soft pornographer, hopes to get to 10,000 followers on Instagram. That, he says, is where the real money starts, the kind of income “that lets you live middle-class anywhere in the world.” “Anywhere?”I say. “Tokyo?” He gets defensive and tells me I know nothing about social media.
The Elected King of Black America or the Black King of Progressivism
The Elected King of Black America or the Black King of Progressivism Published February 18, 2026 A Dream Deferred Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power Abby Phillip Flatiron Books ISBN: 9781250806314 1.
How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America
From the end of the Civil War to World War I, African Americans experienced extraordinary change. In one respect, they went from being enslaved people to citizens, from slavery to freedom, in a complete redefinition of a people.
Intelligence vs Virtue
I have been using a tool called Warp for quite some time now, and these days I am rebuilding my homelab. So I’m giving it a workout. And I am very pleased with how Warp, which is a terminal emulator with AI, is helping me reconfigure and debug a lot of systems I use from the command line. It is now equipped with Claude 3.7 which seems to be benchmarking nicely - and there are things it still can’t do, but it is a highly evolved tool. It falls into that category I have as an expert system.
The Journey of the Black Scholar as Ideological Terminator
Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (2024, W. Norton and Company) 428 pages, no photos, no index 1. Judgement Day In the summer of 1984, economist Glenn Loury goes to Washington, D.
‘The Great Black Hope’ Review: Making a Play for Change
Oliver Stone’s cacophonous and excessive 1999 pro-football drama, “Any Given Sunday,” offers the viewer Willie Beamen, the black third-string quarterback of a fictional, playoff-aspiring team. When the team’s aging white star quarterback and his white backup are both injured on the field, Beamen enters the game and quickly becomes a sensation. Beamen can run and throw and, much to his coach’s chagrin, improvises plays not in the team’s playbook.
The Transfiguration of Cori Bush
The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America (2022, Alfred A. Knopf) 251 pages including acknowledgements, no index or photos 1. The foreground On Tuesday, August 6, voters in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District will decide who will be the Democratic nominee, and hence the winner of the seat as the district is deeply Democratic: either incumbent Cori Bush or challenger Wesley Bell, currently the St. Louis County prosecutor.
Groovin’ on a Sunday Afternoon with the Rascals
Felix Cavaliere: Memoir of a Rascal (2022, Independently Published) 299 pages including photos 1. The taking of Pelham. . . 1, 2, 3 Felix Cavaliere (b. 1942), the founder of the famed 1960s rock group the Rascals (aka the Young Rascals), often practiced with his bandmates in the basement of his parents’ home in Pelham Manor, New York, in the early days when the band was unknown.
‘3 Shades of Blue’ Review: Miles Davis and Friends
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Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero, Liberal or Conservative?
1. The Black Republican seeks a home Jackie Robinson (1920-1972) was a Republican. People who know this seem reluctant to acknowledge it, as if it must be some mistake, an indication on their part that this man who was so insistent on Blacks having their civil rights, the man who was such an energetic fundraiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), could not have belonged to what amounts to America’s conservative party, or America’s “White” party.
Jann Wenner, Media Mogul, Steps in Deep Doo-doo
Jann Wenner, co-founder and former editor of Rolling Stone, co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and one of the pillars of the pop culture criticism business, has succeeded in sabotaging his new book, The Masters, before it has even been widely reviewed. Wrecking the sales of one’s own book almost borders on a talent to be marveled at.
The St. Louis Cardinals Sell - But Maybe Not Enough
[ { "name": "Ad - NativeInline - Injected", "component": "37365813", "insertPoint": "3", "requiredCountToDisplay": "5" },{ "name": "Real 1 Player (r2) - Inline", "component": "37365812", "insertPoint": "2/3", "requiredCountToDisplay": "9" } ] “The rich get richer and the poor get — children,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby. Nothing illustrates the truth of that more than the stage of the Major League Baseball season called the trade deadline.
What the Baseball Sellers Buy
Gerald Early “The rich get richer and the poor get—children,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby. Nothing illustrates the truth of that more than the stage of the Major League Baseball season called the trade deadline. Baseball generates more of a hullabaloo about trading players than any other team sport. It is America’s oldest team sport and the tradition of trading players is deeply embedded in its culture, in its method of operation, in how it sells itself to its fans.
Opinion | Black Americans Have Always Had Mixed Feelings About Affirmative Action
In the spring of 2020, I taught a class at Washington University in St. Louis entitled “Black Conservatives and Their Discontent: African Americans and Conservatism in America.” Eight students enrolled in the course, all of them Black. Among the readings were portions of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. On one particular day, we were concentrating on Steele’s objections to affirmative action.
Black History Month Note No. 2
Rise of the Black Quarterback: What It Means for America (Andscape, 2022) 282 pages including photos, index, and notes When this season’s Super Bowl combatants were decided, with both the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs boasting Black quarterbacks in Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes for the first time in history, Doug Williams, the first Black quarterback to lead his then-named Washington Redskins to a 42-10 victory over the Broncos in 1988, likened the historic matchup to the...
Black Lives, White Lives
About the Book Now with a new foreword, this timely reissuefeatures aremarkable collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States for a new generation of activists. One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn.
Black History Month Note 1: Let’s Talk About Ethel Waters
Gerald Early “Sometimes I think this big size of mine has prevented me from becoming a human being. Nobody’s protective instincts ever seemed to be aroused by a huge girl. I was so eager to feel sheltered and have people like me. I was hungry for a kind word. When it didn’t come I cried inwardly, but, being myself, I also began to build up my defenses.” (Waters, 64) • • • So actress/singer Ethel Waters writes about her girl self in her 1951 autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow.
Why American Politics Are Sometimes Seriously Unserious
Gerald Early “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” so said Ralph Emerson. Those who are wisely inconsistent remind us of this quote as we marvel at the grandeur of their twists and turns. Of course, these people are not likely to have ever read anything by Emerson or even to offer the title of a book, poem, or essay that he wrote. But the name Emerson itself sounds a bit like the Mount Rushmore of American intellectualism. So why not quote him, sort of?
The Mystery of Christmas Revealed!
Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe: Christmas Traditions Explained (2022, Regnery History) 306 pages including index, bibliography, and notes. I’ll be home for Christmas You can count on me. . . I’ll be home for Christmas If only in my dreams. —Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, and Buck Ram, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” 1943 Chapter nine of Michael P. Foley’s Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe offers a good overview of some of the most famous religious carols and popular songs associated with Christmas.
Wakanda Forever is a Bad Film but an Important One
Gerald Early The much-anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, sequel to the wildly successful Black Panther (2018) is not a good film. First, it is too long. At two-and-a-half hours, this bloated spectacle feels labored and poorly conceived.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, November Edition : A Very Short Introduction to Plagues and Diseases We Know and Used to Know
Gerald Early This little tidbit about a series of cholera outbreaks in Cleveland only caught my attention because of the city, not the illness. For some reason, I have bumped into Cleveland a lot this fall semester in a graduate class I am teaching on African American autobiography. William Wells Brown, the St. Louis slave who escaped at the age of 19, wound up in Cleveland for several years, helping other enslaved Blacks escape.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, October Edition
Gerald Early Thirteen ways of thinking about orange • I must have watched The Godfather six or seven times since its initial release including seeing it in the theater during its opening weekend. I never paid any attention to the oranges in the film except for Brando scaring his grandson with them during his death scene. This just goes to show how inept I would be if I were a film critic or film scholar. I do not see the obvious.
How to Start a Book Club—and Keep it Going - Common Reader
Gerald Early Over a half-dozen years ago, at least, I proposed to Gene Dobbs Bradford, then the executive director of Jazz St. Louis, and Phil Dunlap, the organization’s education director, to launch a book club. I am not sure what made me want to do it. It was not as though I lacked enough things to do. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt. I was a member of Jazz St. Louis’s board of trustees, but I never attended meetings.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, September Edition
Gerald Early • I knew that the ostrich was nothing for anyone to mess around with, but a magpie?! I should have known about magpies from watching the antics of Heckle and Jeckle as a kid but, alas, I thought they were mere Negro tricksters, to use a phrase, not actual deadly birds.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, August Edition
Gerald Early I grew up in Philadelphia, where not liking soft pretzels is akin to not liking a Philly cheese steak, which means not being a true Philadelphian at all. When I was a boy, I bought soft pretzels from old guys who sold them from wooden hand carts situated on downtown street corners. (Now you can buy them from a chain called the Philly Pretzel Factory.) The custom was to slather the pretzel with mustard and, if the pretzel was fresh, enjoy a prime eating experience.
The Endless Summer
During my childhood, compared to some big city schools, Philadelphia’s school terms seemed to last later. We went to school well into June. I remember doing art projects for Flag Day, June 14, usually creating an American flag from some sort of material that an art teacher found suitable. Classes continued for about another week after Flag Day.
What, to the American, is Independence Day?
Doubtless, Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 oration, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July” will find itself more popular this year in some quarters than it may have been in the past. The mood of the country is fraught. There is a sense that perhaps the nation is on the brink of rebellion, separation, or complete disaster and downfall from which nothing will rescue it.
Some Interesting Items I Found on the Internet, July Edition
Gerald Early • When I was a boy, I might have added actress Janet Leigh to this list after seeing her in the film Houdini, playing the wife/assistant of the famous magician/escape artist. I would not have been wrong as women assistants worked hard in magic, curling up inside boxes and cabinets, providing sex appeal and misdirection when necessary, clearing the stage of unneeded apparatus, and the stuff that makes a magic act succeed.
How to Time a Professional Baseball Game
Gerald Early Last Friday (June 24), I attended a Las Vegas Aviators baseball game at Las Vegas Ballpark, located in Summerlin. The Aviators are the AAA-affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, the Major League team that many Las Vegans feel will move to Sin City one day soon. It was over 100 degrees at the start of the game at 7:05 pm, but that is all right because this is a dry heat, which, I am told, is much better than its opposite, the sort of heat that brutalizes St. Louis.
The Complex Fate of Being a Proud America
Gerald Early At the retirement subdivision where I live in Las Vegas, there was a ceremony on Memorial Day morning 2022 in front of the community center. I had read about it in the subdivision’s newsletter and promptly forgot until Ida, my wife, and I were walking toward the center to use the fitness equipment. It was good to get out for a walk to the center early in the morning before it got too hot.
Black Conservatives Explain It All! or Princes and Powers 2.0
…for the American Negro is possibly the only man of color who can speak of the West with real authority, whose experience, painful as it is, also proves the vitality of the so transgressed Western ideals.
Dave Chappelle and the Slaying of American Taboos
Gerald Early James Baldwin once described American society as “much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them,”¹ or more precisely, liberated from the need for them. It might be said about America today that we gleefully smash taboos while energetically creating new ones which, one supposes, are improvements over the ones we overthrew.
The Boxer, the Whorehouse, and the Journey to the End of the Night
Shot at a Brothel: The Spectacular Demise of Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena (2021, Hamilcar Publications) 104 pages, one photo Argentine heavyweight Oscar Bonavena’s most important fight, certainly his most publicized, was against Muhammad Ali on December 7, 1970 at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was not as exciting as when the first Argentine heavyweight, Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, fought heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey on September 14, 1923, also in New York.
Race Empress of the Air: Remembering Bessie Coleman, Aviatrix, Who Died on April 30, 96 Years Ago
It seems fitting to refer to Bessie Coleman as an aviatrix, not an aviator. It was how she identified herself. The fact that she was Black was important to her but the fact that she was a woman was equally important. Some feminine versions of nouns are useful, even compelling, poetical: actress, for instance, or mistress, or stewardess. (If one wants to be radical about this and subsume everything under one noun, why not call, for example, all thespians, male and female, actresses and not actors?
Gerald Early March 31, 2022 Director Jules Dassin in Paris 1970 (right), walking with the assistance of his son Joe Dassin, an American-born French singer. Now that our picture is finished, I find that I have a great deal more respect for all motion pictures, even the bad ones, than I had before. However unsatisfactory they may be from the artistic viewpoint, immense pain and effort, many disappointments and much agony went into their making, not to mention weariness of mind and body.
The Slap Heard Round the World, or What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
Gerald Early March 28, 2022 I learned last night while catching up on the news that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on the stage of the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, aka the Oscars, for making a joke about Smith’s wife. Now, I thought, the Oscars have figured out how to make this long, boring show interesting: have the participants assault each other.
Mar|Apr 2001
Vol. 99, No. 4 Features Blood Feuds A recent symposium at Penn probed the causes, symptoms and solutions of ethnic warfare. By Samuel Hughes Going Where Science Leads Established in 1892 as a museum for anatomic specimens as well as a center for the “increase of original scientific knowledge,” the Wistar Institute today is at the forefront of basic research on cancer, AIDS and other diseases. By Joan P. Capuzzi Giresi New Faces Department of Fine Arts Graduate Faculty.
Black History Month: An Origin Story
Gerald Early February 21, 2022 Dr. Carter G. Woodson in a 1915 photograph. 1. The Obsessed Raider of the Lost Black Ark When I was a schoolboy, Black History Month was known as Negro History Week. It was celebrated during the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. (I especially liked the month of February as a child because there were two national holidays: Lincoln’s birthday and George Washington’s birthday, February 22.
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