It looks like we're in for some real May weather in the next several days - sunny and in the high teens and low twenties. It was sunny today and got up to 18, but was quite breezy.
A nice change today: I actually went for an afternoon stroll with my wife. We walked up to Wortley village in hopes of finding the house written up in the paper today where they had planted 800 tulips in their front yard. We didn't find it, but did find some tulips. And dogwood.
It's a pretty neighbourhood. We decided if we ever had millions of dollars and could afford a gardener and expensive real estate, we'd live in Wortley village or - my suggestion - St. James St. between Colborne and Waterloo. We just need someone to give us a lot of money...
The trees in the park at the forks are still pumping out blossoms. One group fades and another takes over. This was in the little park off York St. The young woman in the background was one of a trio of south Asian women who were taking pictures of the trees. I've noticed before in this park that it's very often Asian people who are most admiring of the blossoms - sitting under them, basking in their glow, taking pictures. In Japan, of course, viewing cherry blossoms is a national pastime.
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I am coming to the end of the life of Frederick Douglass. As I finished my run this morning, my audiobook reader started the Epilogue. The old orator isn't dead yet, but has little more than a year to live. He's still speaking out for black rights, still castigating whites for their betrayal of the values they espouse. He is still in huge demand as an orator and still writing.
It is a stirring story, but a sad one in a way too. All his early life he fought against slavery and later for the freedom and equality of African Americans. Yet after all the great victories of Emancipation and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that gave black men the vote, in the twilight of his years Douglass would be disheartened by the horrors of the Jim Crow era in the south.
Lynchings and voter intimidation were commonplace, and enforced segregation was written into law in many southern states. There were few protections in law for blacks against the depredations of the enraged white supremacists who formed the mobs that were judge, jury and executioner in lynchings. And thanks to the sharecropping system, brought in after Emancipation, many southern freedmen were virtually indentured labourers, little better off than when they were slaves, never able to own land or get their heads above water economically.
In one of his last set speeches, which he delivered many times in the final couple of years of his life, Douglass talked about how the south and white supremacists had found victory in their defeat in the Civil War, while blacks and northern progressives had found defeat in victory.
What's doubly depressing for a modern reader of this story is that so many of the same issues still prevail in race relations in the U.S. today. Maybe there haven't been lynchings in recent years, but we still have blacks routinely being murdered by white supremacists, still have southern state governments - hello Georgia! - passing laws designed to suppress the black vote.
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