London blossoms

I have little energy for this today after a third night of inadequate sleep.

I did do my run this morning, though, while listening to another half hour of Frederick Douglass's story. It's 1874 and his career has hit the skids a bit. He very naively accepted what amounted to a figurehead position as president of a bank set up by the government to help black freedmen. The bank did well at first, but had been badly managed under a laissez-faire board of trustees, employees had embezzled depositor's funds and Douglass had no choice within a few months but to recommend shutting it down.

As he later said, "I was married to a corpse." That didn't stop him taking some of the blame. That same year, his last newspaper, The New National Era, which he had left largely to sons Louis and Fred Jr. to run, also failed. It was an annus horribilis if ever there was one. Yet, Blight says at the outset of this chapter that some of Douglass's best writing and most influential political action are yet to come.

His editorializing and speechifying in these years mostly took aim at the weakening influence of the radical Republicans, the end of formal reconstruction in the south and the depressing ascendancy of states' rights doctrines that give white racists a free hand in southern states. The Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups carry out campaigns of intimidation, terror and outright murder in the south to push down blacks and stop them voting.

It's astonishing how all the same issues still prevail in U.S. politics 150 years later - except the two parties have switched sides.

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A short walk to take pictures of blossoms, including a rare yellow magnolia in front of the Service Ontario building that Karen spotted yesterday, tulips and ornamental cherry blossoms at the forks of the Thames and a budding redbud in the parking lot of the Lerner Law building half a block from here.