#gibson avenue

[celebritybodyswaps]

Could u write a story about Gibson and haven lough swapping bodies

The Great Friends Shift: Haven Lough & Gibson Avenue

On a regular day in Florida Haven and Gibson decided to have their regular sleepovers to help make TikTok’s. They thought this day would be like every other day and that they could make TikTok’s and have a great time. Little did they know their perfect night would soon be the best and worst time of their life.

Gibson’s Pov

Wow man i really wish i was your height Haven. I could be as tall as you and never have to worry about girls not liking me. But with this height girls reject me cause they say im too short.

Well too bad if only you could grow a little taller am i right Haven said jokingly.

Yeah sure Gibson replied in a saddened tone.

(After recording a couple of videos they decided to head to bed and overnight Gibson dreamed of swapping heights with Haven little did Gibson know his dreams were about to become reality.)

Gibson soon woke up but he realized he wasn’t in the living room couch anymore but in Havens room. He decided to go use the restroom and shrugged the thought aways. But thats when he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror but only it wasn’t his it was Havens. He jumped up in excitement but accidentally hit his head. He soon ran to Haven in Gibsons body. He shook Haven in his old body to wake him up.

Haven wake up! You need to see this I’m you.

What do you mean your me thats when Haven opened his eyes and realized his body was standing in-front of him.

What happened Haven yelled in Gibsons body. What did you do!

I don’t know i woke up like this believe me. Haven in Gibsons body got up furiously.

As he got up Gibson decided to play a joke.

Look its okay to admit im taller now said Gibson in Havens body.

Thats when Haven jumped as high as he could to try to hit Gibson but he missed.

Stop playing around Haven i mean Gibson. This isnt funny! I want my body back.

I told you i dont know how it happened we are going to be stuck like this for a while.

Fine i guess said Haven in Gibsons body. Well i guess if we are going to stay in each others body we have to call ourselves by our bodies names. So i guess my name is Gibson now. Haven said in a saddened tone.

Well i guess im Haven now i said happily.

Well “Gibson” we have to take a picture as to not alert our fans now pose.

After we took a picture I laughed because of the face Haven Im sorry i mean Gibson was making. Well i guess we will have to figure out a way to fix this.

Part two coming soon

[rotinmycore]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

TONIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.

The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.

In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers.

The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!) and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs (no fixed layout!).

Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers. As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that training.

All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate.

I started thinking about this 25 years ago, the first time I met William Gibson. I'd been assigned by the Globe and Mail to interview him for the launch of All Tomorrow's Parties:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

One of the questions I asked was about his famous aphorism, "The street finds its own use for things." Given how quickly each post-punk tendency had been absorbed by commercial culture, couldn't we say that "Madison Avenue finds its own use for the street"? His answer started me down a quarter-century of thinking and writing about this subject:

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares.

I think this is what drove a lot of people to 4chan (remember, before 4chan was famous for incubating neofascism, it was the birthplace of Anonymous): its shock culture, combined with a strong cultural norm of anonymity, made for a difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while).

All of this brings me to AI art (or AI "art"). In his essay on the "eerieness" of AI art, Henry Farrell quotes Mark Fisher's "The Weird and the Eerie":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

"Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

When we contemplate "authentic" countercultural work – ransom-note DTP, the weird old web, seizure-inducing Myspace GIFs – it is arresting because the personality of the human entity responsible for it shines through. We might be able to recognize where that person ganked their source-viewed HTML or pixel-optimized GIF, but we can also make inferences about the emotional meaning of those choices. To see that work is to connect to a mind. That mind might not necessarily belong to someone you want to be friends with or ever meet in person, but it is unmistakably another person, and you can't help but learn something about yourself from the way that their work makes you feel.

This is why corporate work is so often called "soulless." The point of corporate art is to dress the artificial person of the corporation in the stolen skins of the humans it uses as its substrate. Corporations are potentially immortal, artificial colony organisms. They maintain the pretense of personality, but they have no mind, only action that is the crescendo of an orchestra of improvised instruments played by hundreds or thousands of employees and a handful of executives who are often working directly against one another:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans). The real thing that is signified by CEOs' professed fears of runaway AI is runaway corporations. As Ted Chiang says, the experience of being nominally in charge of a corporation that refuses to do what you tell it to is the kind of thing that will give you nightmares about autonomous AI turning on its masters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

The job of corporate designers is to find the signifiers of authenticity and dress up the corporate entity's robotic imperatives in this stolen flesh. Everything about AI is done in service to this goal: the chatbots that replace customer service reps are meant to both perfectly mimic a real, competent corporate representative while also hewing perfectly to corporate policy, without ever betraying the real human frailties that none of us can escape.

In the same way, the shillbots that pretend to be corporate superfans online are supposed to perfectly amplify the corporate message, the slow AI's conception of its own virtues, without injecting their own off-script, potentially cringey enthusiasms.

The Hollywood writers' strike was, at root, about the studio execs' dream that they could convert the "insights" of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. "Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars" is exactly how you prompt an AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Corporate design's job is to produce the seeming of intention without any intender. The "personality" we're meant to sense when we encounter corporate design isn't the designer's, nor the art director's, nor even the CEO's. The "personality" is meant to be the slow AI's, but a corporation doesn't have a personality.

In his 2018 short story "Noon in the antilibrary," Karl Schroeder describes an "antilibrary" as an endlessly deep anaerobic lagoon of generative botshit:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/18/104097/noon-in-the-antilibrary/

The antilibrary is a generative AI system that can produce entire librarys’-worth of fake books with fake authors, fake citations by other fake experts with their own fake books and biographies and fake social media accounts, on-demand and instantly. It was speculation in 2018; it’s possible now. Creating an antilibrary is just a matter of investing in a sufficient number of graphics cards and electricity.

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet

Reading Karl's reflections on the antilibrary crystallized something for me that I've been thinking about for a quarter-century, since I interviewed Gibson at the Penguin offices in north Toronto. It snapped something into place that I've trying to fit since encountering Henry's thoughts on the "eeriness" of AI work and the intent without an intender.

It made me realize why I dislike AI art so much, on a deep, aesthetic level. The point of an image generator is to buffer the intention of the prompter (which might be genuinely creative and bursting with personality) in layers of automated decision-making that flense the final product of any hint of the mind that caused its creation.

The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation.

AI art is born coopted. Even the 4chan equivalent of AI – the deeply transgressive and immoral nonconsensual pornography – feels no different from the "official" AI porn churned out by "real" pornographers. "Shrimp Jesus" and other SEO-optimized Facebook slop is so uncanny because it is simultaneously "weird" ("that which does not belong") and yet it belongs in the same aesthetic bucket of the most anodyne Corporate Memphis ephemera:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

We call it "generative" but AI art can't generate the kind of turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil. An artform that can't be transgressive is sterile, stillborn, a dead end.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Jake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970s_fanzines_(21224199545).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[onemorecupofcoffee]

"The Need For Topical Music", written by Phil Ochs

Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. 

It is somewhat ironic that in this age of forced conformity and fear of controversy the folksinger may be assuming the same role. The newspapers have unfortunately told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the cold war truth so help them, advertisers. If a reporter breaks the "code of the West” that used to be confined to Hoot Gibson movies, he’ll find himself out on the street with a story to tell and all the rivers of mass communication damned up. 

The folksingers of today must face up to a great challenge in their music. Folk music is an idiom that deals with realities and not just realities of the past as some would assert. More than ever there is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. 

I have run into some singers who say, “Sure, I agree with most topical songs, but they're just too strong to do in public. Besides, I don't want to label myself or alienate some of my audience into thinking I'm unpatriotic.”

Yet this same person will get on the stage and dedicate a song to Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger as if in tribute to an ideal they are afraid to reach for. Those who would compromise or avoid the truth inherent in folk music are misleading themselves and their audiences. In a world so full of lies and corruption, can we allow our own national music to go the way of Madison Avenue?

There are definite grounds for criticism of topical music, however. Much of the music has been too bitter and too negative for many audiences to appreciate, but lately there has been a strong improvement in both quantity and quality, and the commercial success of songs like “If I Had a Hammer” have made many of the profit seekers forget their prejudices.

One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies. A case in point is Pete Seeger's classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” which brought a message of peace to millions, including many of the younger generation who do not consider themselves involved in politics.

Folk music often arises out of vital movements and struggles. When the union movement was a growing, stirring and honest force in America, it produced a wealth of material to add to the nation's musical heritage. Today, there regrettably seem to be only two causes that will arouse an appreciable amount of people from their apathetic acceptance of the world; the Negro struggle for civil rights and the peace movement. To hear a thousand people singing "We Shall Overcome" without the benefit of Hollywood's bouncing ball is to hear a power and beauty in music that has no limits in its effect.

It never ceases to amaze me how the American people allow the hit parade to hit them over the head with a parade of song after meaningless song about love. If the powers that be absolutely insist that love should control the market, at least they should be more realistic and give divorce songs an equal chance.

Topical music is often a method of keeping alive a name or event that is worth remembering. For example many people have been vividly reminded of the depression days through Woody Guthrie’s dust bowl ballads. Sometimes the songs will differ in interpretation from the textbooks as with “Pretty Boy Floyd”.

Every newspaper headline is a potential song, and it is the role of an effective songwriter to pick out the material that has the interest, significance and sometimes humor adaptable to music.

A good writer must be able to picture the structure of a song and as hundreds of minute ideas race through his head, he must reject the superfluous and trite phrases for the cogent powerful terms. Then after the first draft is completed, the writer must be his severest critic, constantly searching for a better way to express every line in his song.

I think there is a coming revolution (pardon my French) in folk music as it becomes more and more popular in the U. S., and as the search for new songs becomes more intense. The news today is the natural resource that folk music must exploit in order to have the most vigorous folk process possible.

(Broadside #22, March 1963)

[rabbit-head-007]

I’ve said this in another post but I really like the prototype design for Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite where she was portrayed as a mute Gibson girl - it felt like a really unique avenue for Elizabeth, let alone any character

Since the design was never used, I decided to take inspiration for my own and create Ms. Clementine Kirk - a genius inventor with a diagnosis of Apraxia of Speech who travels the world with her doctor and uses her inventions to solve murders and mysteries

[resplendentoutfit]

Who Exactly was the Gibson Girl?

The Gibson Girl was named after illustrator Charles Gibson who created pen and ink drawings of an idealized woman of the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Fashionable, demure, tall and slender, yet with abundant hips, bust, and buttocks, she was the embodiment of middle-class American feminine beauty.

Here's what Mr. Gibson himself said about the Gibson Girl:

" I'll tell you how I got what you have called the 'Gibson Girl.' I saw her on the streets, I saw her at the theatres, I saw her in the churches. I saw her everywhere and doing everything. I saw her idling on Fifth Avenue and at work behind the counters of the stores ... I haven't really created a distinctive type, the nation made the type. "

Charles Gibson (American, 1867 - 1944 ) • Gibson Girls at the Beach • c. 1900

The Crush • 1901

Studies in Expression: When Women are Jurors • 1902 • Pen and ink over graphite underdrawing • Published in Life, October 23, 1902.

Several of the Gibson sketches appeared on covers of Life, Ladies' Home Journal, and Scribner's.

Perhaps the most famous Gibson was the actress Camille Clifford, who, with her elegant figure and high tumbled hairstyle, epitomized the Gibson Girl ideal.

[justacanofcorn]

SAVIOUR COMPLEX (Mark Hoffman x F!Reader Pt. 9)

(Pt. 8)(Pt. 10)

Rating: M

TAGS: language/brief mention of canon typical violence and gore/past abuse/Mark Hoffman being a c*p/reader's life is maybe becoming less normal/Mark is protective bc it's his job but he's also problematic/because he's a c*p/Detective Gibson is his own tw

Mark has to take the night to cool the fuck off. When he leaves your place he is no position to back to the precinct to talk to the chief, and if he goes to his other job, he’ll likely do something irresponsible and needlessly violent. Like kill. And killing is distasteful.

It’s times like these that, despite his better judgment, he misses John. Misses his wisdom, despite the hypocrisy of it.

So, with no other options, Mark grabs the pistol from his apartment, his leather gloves, and heads for the warehouse.

The caution tape is still up and Mark is surprised until he remembers- this is still an active crime scene, despite the fact that no one is there now. It’s maybe been 24 hours since he and you had arrived just as Ted was being wheeled out.

You…he can’t think of you for too long before his pulse begins to race- for multiple reasons.

Instead he focuses on the crime scene, lifting the tape and stepping carefully into the warehouse. He never actually made it inside, though he’d gotten some of the information from the other cops between then and now.

He steps around dried puddles of blood, areas barricaded by tiny flags and string. Those aren’t his concern, anyway. He has few thoughts for Ted or even the trap itself- until he sees one of the mechanisms.

It’s a blade, still affixed to its contraption that hasn’t been taken in for evaluation yet. Now, Mark didn’t see the body as it was being taken, but he knew now that, while they were included on the stretcher, his arms and legs were severed. And the blade in front of Mark was sharp enough, precise enough, to cut through without any dramatic blood splattering.

Fine metal. Sturdy metal. Metal chosen specifically for a job like this. Which means this person knows what they’re doing, and has the means to do it.

He pokes around further, sidestepping into an adjoining hallway. Regardless of reputation or moonlighting, Mark is proud of his skills as a detective. He got there before John, and even with the crooked system, he’d like to think he could still land the job on merit alone.

Like here, for instance, he zeroes in on a track of footprints among the dust and grime that have obviously already been observed, judging by other police equipment and prints. But he goes slightly cold at slightly deeper indentation. Whoever this was favors their left foot. The right print is too flat, a purely vertical step as opposed to the left heel to toe.

Whoever this is has a right foot prosthetic.

He could be wrong. He hopes he is. But he’s also not foolish enough to believe in coincidences and that’s the only other option.

But if it’s who he’s thinking…why? Why would this person go after Ted? Presumably, the two of you have had no interactions. But that’s a foolish thought as well. Among the useful avenues of thinking John would provide was the truth that more people know people you know than not. Or, at the very least, it’s a safe assumption.

He needs to check on you anyway. What’s the harm in asking about the last time you went to a hospital?

-

Mark texts you. Not calls. Texts.

It sets off alarms in your head but mostly you’re just happy to finally hear from him, two days later. He asks to meet and you suggest work before your shift, knowing Gibson will leave as soon as he drops you off. Mark agrees.

You can’t help it. You put a little more effort into your appearance. You know he doesn’t mind; he’s seen you at your worst. But you’re giddy and you know you’ll have to hide it. Doing your makeup is a nice outlet for that energy.

Strangely enough, you don’t mind getting a ride from Gibson. The earlier you get to work, the longer you’ll have with Mark. When you step outside, Gibson is leaning against his car, arms crossed, watching something above the roof of your building. When you stand by the passenger side door, you follow his eyeline, you find a murder of crows standing in a line.

You turn your head to him in slow doubt.

“Um…big fan of birds?”

He shrugs. “Black birds. Anyway, I was surprised to get your text. An hour earlier?”

“I’m opening and covering for Gerri. Appreciate you getting here.”

The oddly kind words slip out of your mouth before you can stop them, and they sound convincing enough that Gibson cocks a brow.

“I’m touched. Get in.”

The ride is quiet, which is fine by you. But when he pulls up to the nearly empty parking lot, you both immediately notice Mark’s cruiser. You bite your tongue to suppress the curse that almost slips out.

“Well well well. Shall we go say hello?”

You scowl at him.

“We’re allowed to see each other.”

“Opening early? You’re a good liar.”

“Thanks,” you mutter, exiting the vehicle. He follows suit.

“Seriously, Gibson, back off.”

It gets worse when Mark gets out of his car.

“Motherfuck…” you mumble. You turn into yourself slightly, prepping for a fistfight. You don’t, however, slow down before stopping next to Mark, pulling his head down to give him a kiss on the cheek. You feel the corner of his mouth crinkle into a smile.

“Play nice,” you whisper before pulling away.

“Hoffman. How’s indefinite suspension treating you?”

“Good. I’ll keep your seat warm.”

“Assuming I fuck up bad enough for me to get there. Just enjoy your time on the bench.” He nods at you. “Pick you up at lunch.”

Before you can protest, Gibson is getting back into his car and peeling out of the parking lot. You exhale and Mark puts a hand on your lower back.

“Missed you.”

He pulls you in for a kiss. You reciprocate, of course, but you frown when you pull away.

“Don’t antagonize him. Just let him do his job. He’s harmless.”

“Pain in my ass.”

You walk towards the restaurant.

“Have you talked to the chief yet?”

You knock on the front doors and Gerri lets you in.

“Hey, hot shot,” they greet Mark.

“Mornin’, Gerri.”

You take Mark to a corner table, the same table he took when he first came in to watch you. You both sit.

“So, the chief.”

“Right,” he sighs. “Going in tomorrow. Wanted to give him some time.”

“Wanted him to see how much they need you?” You remark with a sly smile. Mark chuckles and grabs one of your hands on the table.

“Something like that.”

He’s got this look in his eyes. Some depth that you can’t decide if it’s thoughtfulness or concern.

“Like?”

He lowers his voice but only a little. The only other people are the openers, and no one cares when an employee brings in a significant other or family member. One of the other waitresses will sometimes bring in her 2 year old to sit until the babysitter can get her.

But Mark’s being reasonably cautious.

“I went back to the crime scene, poked around.”

“Isn’t that what they say perpetrators do? Go back to the scene of the crime? What if you’d gotten caught?”

“You’re a regular detective. No, I know their shifts.”

You pull back your hand and crack your finger joints as a tic.

“What did you find?”

“The usual.”

He waves it away but you know that can’t be true. He’s also not looking at you.

“Mark.” He taps the table. “Mark, don’t lie to me.”

He looks at you and sighs again. “Sorry, you’re right. But you’re not gonna like it when I can’t tell you everything.”

“Then just tell me what you can and we’ll take it from there.”

He makes a sound in his throat. He’s not convinced, but he caves anyway. “Alright, lemme ask you a question. You been to the doctor recently? For anything?”

You stutter. “Um, just my GP for a checkup in June. Why?”

“What’s your doctor’s name?”

“Dr. Shane Campbell. Why?” Realization dawns on your face. “Wait, you’re saying a doctor did this?”

“He shakes his head. “That’s not-“

“But that’s what you’re thinking, right? Unless you’re looking for a recommendation.”

“See, this is why-“

“Oh, don’t even go there.”

“I cannot in good conscience accuse someone of something like that until I have any evidence at all.”

“And what if you’re right and this is a person I need to look out for?”

“Listen to me. Nothing, nothing is gonna happen to you without me knowing. No one is gonna go near you. And if you ever feel unsafe you let me know and I’ll be there.”

They’re meant to be comforting words, and you know that once you calm down you’ll be able to hear them as such, but for now, you’re bitter.

“It’s not fair that you get to know this and I don’t.”

“Maybe. But that’s how it has to be right now.”

He sees your scathing look at the wall over his shoulder. “Hey, look at me. Can you trust that I know what I’m talking about?”

Of course you can. But you hate not being in control. It’s why you keep your life small. Everything is tight and compact. You can control that. And you’re not used to relinquishing any of that control.

But who’s ever been there to offer?

You sigh. Nod. Pull Mark in for another kiss. His fingers graze along your jaw and you break it yet again before either of you get too into it. You put your forehead to his.

“Why were you out there when you knew Gibson would see?” You do not miss the attempt to hide a smirk. “Holy shit. You did it on purpose. You were showing off.”

“Maybe I was.”

“You’re horrible,” you smile.

“Yeah, maybe I am.”

[kemetic-dreams]

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson ,unsung activist (April 17, 1912 – August 29, 1992) was a civil rights activist and educator in Montgomery, Alabama.Known for initiating the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, USA

Born near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. She attended Fort Valley State College and then became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was married to Wilbur Robinson for a short time. Five years later, she went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. After teaching in Texas she then accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery. It was there she joined the Women's Political Council, which Mary Fair Burks had founded three years earlier. In 1949, Robinson was verbally attacked by a bus driver for sitting in the front "Whites only" section of the bus. Her response to the incident was to attempt to start a protest boycott. But, when she approached her fellow members of the Woman’s Political Council with her story and proposal, she was told that it was “a fact of life in Montgomery.” In late 1950, she succeeded Burks as president of the WPC and helped focus the group's efforts on bus abuses. Robinson was an outspoken critic of the treatment of African-Americans on public transportation. She was also active in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The Women's Political Council had made complaints about the bus seating to the Montgomery City Commission and about abusive drivers, and achieved some concessions, including an undertaking that drivers would be courteous and having buses stopping at every corner in black neighborhoods, as they did in European areas. After Brown vs. Board of Education, Robinson had informed the mayor of the city that a boycott would come and then after Rosa Parks arrest, they seized the moment to plan the boycott of the buses in Montgomery.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move from her seat in the African area of the bus she was travelling on to make way for a white passenger who was standing. Mrs. Parks, a civil rights organizer, had intended to instigate a reaction from white citizens and authorities. That night, with Mrs. Parks permission, Mrs. Robinson stayed up mimeographing 52,500 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott was initially planned to be for just the following Monday. She passed out the leaflets at a Friday afternoon meeting of AME Zionist clergy among other places and Reverend L. Roy Bennett requested other ministers attend a meeting that Friday night and to urge their congregations to take part in the boycott. Robinson, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, two of her senior students and other Women's Council members then passed out the handbills to high school students leaving school that afternoon. After the success of the one-day boycott, African citizens decided to continue the boycott and established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus their efforts. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president. Jo Ann Robinson became a member of this group. She had denied an official position to the Montgomery Improvement Association because of her teaching position at Alabama State. She served on its executive board and edited their newsletter. In order to protect her position at Alabama State College and to protect her colleagues, Robinson purposely stayed out of the limelight even though she worked diligently with the MIA. Robinson and other WPC members also helped sustain the boycott by providing transportation for boy-cotters.

Robinson was the target of several acts of intimidation. In February 1956, a local police officer threw a stone through the window of her house. Then two weeks later, another police officer poured acid on her car. Then the governor of Alabama ordered the state police to guard the houses of the boycott leaders. The boycott lasted over a year because the bus company would not give in to the demands of the protesters. After a student sit-in in early 1960, Robinson and other teachers that had supported the students, resigned their positions at Alabama State College. Robinson left Alabama State College and moved out of Montgomery that year. She taught at Grambling College in Louisiana for one year and then moved to Los Angeles and taught English in the public school system. In Los Angeles she continued to be active in local women's organizations. She taught in the LA schools until she retired from teaching in 1976. Jo Ann Robinson was also a part of the bus boycott and was strongly against discrimination.

[dertaglichedan]

Addicts shoot up, poop on Bronx street just feet from courthouse: ‘Neighborhood is barbaric’

A residential street in The Bronx has become a regular haunt for homeless heroin addicts who shamelessly shoot up and masturbate in broad daylight, just a stone’s throw from the county courthouse and Borough President Vanessa Gibson’s office, fed-up neighbors told The Post.

Glass from broken bottles and shattered syringes crunched beneath the dress shoes of attorneys walking along the stonewalled western portion of Franz Sigel Park last week, as they made their way down Walton Avenue toward the Bronx County Courthouse on nearby Grand Concourse.

“This neighborhood is barbaric,” said a Walton Avenue resident who asked to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation from drug dealers. “The stairs to the park are covered in graffiti, sh-t and piss. Everything’s rotting and everyone’s suffering.”

*** Now do Seattle...

[lboogie1906]

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (April 17, 1912 – August 29, 1992) was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and educator in Montgomery, Alabama.

She became the first person in her family to graduate from college, attending Fort Valley State College.

She continued her education after earning her MA at Columbia University and continued to study English. She went to teach at Mary Allen College. She accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery.

In 1949 she was verbally attacked by a bus driver for sitting in the front “Whites only” section of the bus. The whites-only section was empty. Out of fear that the incident would escalate and that the driver would go from verbal abuse to physical, she left the bus. Her response to the incident was to attempt to start a protest boycott against bus segregation in Alabama. She approached fellow Women’s Political Council members with her story and proposal, she was told that it was “a fact of life in Montgomery.” She succeeded Burks as president of the WPC and helped focus the group’s efforts on bus abuses. She met with the mayor of Montgomery at the time, W. A. Gayle William A. Gayle. She met with City Hall’s council, but they were not interested in what she had to say. When City Hall’s leaders were no help, she took matters into her own hands and organized a boycott. She was an outspoken critic of the treatment of African Americans on public transportation. She was active in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The WPC made complaints about the bus seating to the Montgomery City Commission and abusive drivers and achieved some concessions, including an undertaking that drivers would be courteous, and having buses stop at every corner in African American neighborhoods as they did in white areas.

After Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), she informed the mayor of the city that a boycott would come. After Rosa Parks’ arrest, they seized the moment to plan the Montgomery bus boycott. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[sweetdreamsjeff]

THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE LAUNDRY WITH BRENDA KAHN

In Features, Interviews by Jason L.05.28.19

Originally published at Hard Rock RPM

Poet. Guitarist. Songwriter. Publisher. Activist. Mother. Brenda Kahn’s music career stretches from the anti-folk scene of the East Village in the early 1990s to a recently published book of poetry about parenting aptly titled The Good, The Bad, And The Laundry. Along the way, Kahn recorded with her friend Jeff Buckley, played Lilith Fair multiple times, ran a website focused on women in music, and answered the call when Bob Dylan wanted her to open a show. While she may have traded the drug dealers of Avenue A for her children and a life in the countryside, Kahn’s keen eye for detail continues to serve her well.

...

The Ryan Adams news was not the least surprising in terms of the issues that persist in the business. How much of that did you experience during your career? While I feel like the 90s were a hugely successful time for women in music, I am terrified to imagine what the artists were experiencing.

I think this is finally changing because of access to the internet. I wish I’d been able to google “Should I get a Fender or a Gibson guitar”.  Or “what are the chords to “Like a Rolling Stone” back when I was in high school. I met several guys along the way who treated me as total equals.  One of whom was Jeff Buckley who taught me the two drum beats I can play on a kit now. And my producer Tim Patalan on Outside the Beauty Salon, who handed me a guitar and said – “You play the lead.”

...

Any memories about touring with Dylan and Buckley that you could share?

Opening for Bob Dylan was one of those bucket list moments that seemed so unlikely, it wasn’t even on the list. We found out about the tour dates while I was in France doing a promotional tour for Epiphany in Brooklyn. My manager busted into the room and said he had good news and bad news.  The good news was I was going to open for Bob Dylan, the bad news was I wasn’t allowed to open for him solo acoustic. I had to have a band. I was in France, the show was in two weeks, and the guys I made the album with were all on tour with other artists. Of course, I said yes.  I had just written the song “too far gone” and the timing was all over the place.  I didn’t know if I would get in trouble, but the band dropped out and I did that one song solo acoustic.  The feeling of being on that stage, where you could hear a pin drop, singing to 6000 Bob Dylan fans… best ever moment.

With Jeff Buckley it was really different because we were friends.  I don’t have a lot of tour stories because we were in different vehicles, but we would hang out at sound checks and play blues songs sometimes or eat together, but mostly we played our shows and went onto the next town.  But my memories of Jeff are more about hanging out in New York.  We spent hours together doing nothing.  Shopping in random thrift stores or making up dumb songs on the guitar.  In my mind, I can see him wheeling my 50lb amp down 9th street to a gig at Brownies, I remember him calling me last minute to come see him open up for Patti Smith at Irving Plaza.

The one serious recording we made together came from a time we were in my apartment and he was playing my tele, this really beautiful riff, and I said, ‘I have something that might work for that’ and started reading these snippets of poems I had written in these tiny notebooks. After about 10 minutes he stopped and looked at me and said “four-track”.  So funny because now you would just pull up an app on your iPhone and click a button, but back then, you had to set up microphones and plugin guitars and set levels. Jeff had a reel to reel tape machine in his apartment.  Anyway, that song turned out to be “Faith Salons” and it’s one of the last things he recorded.  When I hear his foot tapping and his vocals in the background it gets me every time.

[hooked-on-elvis]

🎸Scotty Moore's guitars⚡

Scotty Moore with his '54 Gibson L-5 CESN, originally purchased by him in July 7, 1955.

Besides how it was recording with Elvis and other amazing stories such as one incident involving the three rock and roll pioneers (Elvis, Bill and Scotty) and Bill Black's bass later owned by Paul McCartney, on this interview Scotty talks a bit about his early music instruments' history, such as amplifiers and guitars. He mentions the✨Gibson L-5 CES✨, which we'll know about a bit more from now on:

Much of the RCA 50's recordings of Elvis Presley feature the sound of Scotty Moore's L-5.

Scotty (with Gibson L-5), D.J. Fontana (drums), Elvis (with 1951 Epiphone FT-79*) and Bill Black (bass) in Texarkana, AR, 1955. * The 1951 Epiphone Elvis is playing belonged to Charline Arthur, a female American singer of boogie-woogie, blues, and early rockabilly.

Scotty traded his ES-295 in on July 7, 1955 at the O.K. Houck Piano Co. located on 121 Union Avenue in Memphis, for this Gibson L5 "mainly because the workmanship was just so much better in the L5, of course it cost more too" ($565.00).

L5 CES ad, and Scotty's original receipt for the 1954 L5 CESN.

Much of the RCA fifties recordings of Elvis Presley feature the sound of Scotty Moore's L-5. Scotty (with L5) and Elvis rehearse for the Milton Berle show, June 1956.

Scotty's Gibson L-5 was first used to record "Mystery Train" and on most of the subsequent RCA recordings until January of 57 (though it was apparently used on stage at least in Buffalo, NY on April 1, and Toronto on April 2, 1957). Scotty used it extensively with a custom--built Echosonic amplifier by Ray Butts acquired around April of 55 (which allowed the ability to perform live with the signature slap-back echo sound of the recordings).

The Gibson L5 CES features a single rounded cutaway 17" wide bound hollow body, solid carved spruce top, layered tortoise pickguard, single bound f-holes, maple back/sides/neck, 20 fret bound pointed ebony fingerboard with pearl block inlay, adjustable rosewood bridge, model name engraved trapeze tailpiece with chrome insert, multibound blackface peghead with pearl flame/logo inlay, 3 per side tuners, gold hardware, 2 pickups (P90 single coil in 51, Alnico V in 54 and Humbucker in 57) , 2 volume/2 tone controls, 3 position switch. Available in Natural (Scotty's) and Sunburst finish. Mfd. 1951 to date.

Source: http://www.scottymoore.net/54L5CES.html

Scotty' L5 The guitar when displayed at the Memphis Rock 'N' Soul Museum.

This guitar was owned by Robert A. Johnson for many years and had been on loan for display at the Memphis Rock 'N' Soul Museum. It was sold in 2004 and expected to be on display at the Elvis-A-Rama museum in Las Vegas, NV. In September of 2005 CKX, Inc (the parent company to EPE, Inc.) announced that it had agreed to acquire the assets of Elvis-A-Rama with the intent of closing it with an overall plan to bring a world class Elvis-themed attraction to the Las Vegas strip. Prior to that though this L5 was sold to a private collector in the UK and is no longer on display. Scotty's L5 was purchased from the UK collector in February of 2005 by Heather Mozart shortly after the auction and along with Scotty's 1956 Super 400, Elvis' 1968 Ebony J200 and many other items remains part of her collection.

Scotty's original 1956 Super 400, 1954 L5 and Elvis' 1968 J200 (Elvis' record awards in rear).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

🎸 SCOTTY'S GUITARS OVER THE YEARS

MUCH MORE ABOUT ALL SCOOTY MOORE'S GUITARS, HERE (http://www.scottymoore.net/guitars.html) - Website created and managed by James V. Roy for Scotty Moore with the sole intent to help promote the arts and history of American popular music and Scotty's major role in it.

[mytremendouslydangerousstudent]

Stories I Heard Today 11/18/23

My mom's 80 year old aunt told me a story about her mother (my great grandmother) that I had never heard before. We were in the car on the way to a family dinner. She told me my great grandmother had a sister. When they were about 8 they were walking and sat down on a log to rest but didnt realize it had been on fire and was still smoldering underneath. Her sister was consumed by flames and died.

My friend told me they did online dating once, in 2001. The internet was brand new. The guy was in the military. She had been considering joining. He invited her to a bar. She got there and he was with 5 of his miltary buddies. She tried to fit in and at some point went to the restroom down a long hallway. When she came out she ws cornered by 3 of the military friends, physically trapped. She broke free from them, went straight to her date, grabbed the pitcher of beer before him and chugged it. She slammed it down and said to her date Never contact me again. Then got in her car and drove in the wrong direction of traffic. The story ended with saying shortly thereafter 9/11 happened and she lost all interest in joining the military.

Ive been so lost and trying to pursue all avenues of productivity and life that I can to combat it. I'm using a dating app now and am inundated with mediocrity. The only suitor I have considered is a hot mailman who claimed to love cinema and honesty. He reached out to me but did not ask any questions or acknowledge my attempts to insert myself into my replies. He told me he recently lost his drivers license due to a DUI and was waiting to get his hardship license to go back to work. I asked him if he was on the app to pass time while he was off of work since he didnt seem interested in me. His response was: "Mel Gibson got a dui, that didn’t stop him from creating beautiful art."

I will never stop laughing at this. The thing that's broken in me is something so absurd and stupid totally charmed me cause im fascinated by people and wanted to know how this person could be. I fundamentally want to and enjoy wasting my time.

At the farm, a lady told me about how she wanted to see the plants but she was afraid of lizards so wouldn't step foot in the plot. I reasoned with her, saying I hadn't seen any lizards, and anyways that they don't do anything, they're tiny. She laughed and said no, in church someone had tapped her on shoulder from behind and she thought it was a lizard. She said she jumped up and screamed "Lizard!" until her whole congregation was scrambling around in fear and the person who hd tapped her just watched. I had never heard of anyone being afraid of a lizard and couldn't stop teasing her about it. She was sure of her fear and unphased, seeming to find me foolish for not fearing lizards, but pleasantly so.

Similarly, a volunteer marveled that I never wear gloves while working in the dirt. She asked me if I was afraid of disease and I said no I consider dirt to be medicine. She said dirt has made her sick before. I said ok i don't like gloves or umbrellas. She comes all the time and I can't stand her. Later on she said she and her partner were looking at property to buy outside of town. She flashed a zillow ad at me and i zoomed in on the location. I looked at her and said "This is on my street!" and she said "I know!" with a smile. Definitely never told her where I live.

Thanks for reading.

[zorilleerrant]

Guidelines for requesting a fic from me (this doesn't include nearly all the fandoms I'm comfortable working in and I'll update it as people ask me about other fandoms):

Batman and Batfam

I'll write for anyone (and I do) but of the characters people are less likely to ask me about, my favorites:

Terry McGinnis

Bao Pham

Cass Cain

Claire Clover

Luke Fox

My favorite minor characters:

Maps Mizoguchi

Diego Perez and the Bat Pack

Victoria October

Deb Donovan

Grace O'Halloran

Blade Sommer

Flamingo

Mara Al Ghul

Van Wayne

Lance Bruner

Helena Kyle (Huntress)

Kyle Selinas_450

Li'l Kitten

Evan Blake (Wolfspider)

White Mercy

My favorite ships to write/chat about:

Cass Cain/Xanthe Zhou

Dick Grayson/Garth(/Donna Troy)

Dick Grayson/Jimmy Olsen

Dick Grayson/David Sikela

Ric Grayson/Bea Bennett

Tim Drake/Bernard Dowd

Bruce Wayne/Lex Luthor

Bruce Wayne/Khoa Khan

Bruce Wayne/Black Adam

Babs Gordon/Helena Kyle

Mary Hamilton/Poison Ivy

Diego Perez/Merissa Cooper/Lucas LaPorte

Blade Sommer/Max Gibson

Cass Cain/Steph Brown

Tim Drake/Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong

Steph Brown/Kyle Mizoguchi

My favorite gen relationships:

Bruce Wayne & any of his kids

Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne

Van Wayne & Kate Kane

Beth Kane & Kate Kane (& Mary Hamilton)

Dick Grayson & Barbara Gordon

Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne

Dick Grayson & (Will) Grayson

Dick Grayson & Lance Bruner

Dick Grayson & Zitka

Cass Cain & Steph Brown & Tim Drake

Damian Wayne & Jon-el Kent

Damian Wayne & Mara Al Ghul

Terry McGinnis & Max Gibson

Jason Todd & Terry McGinnis

Cass Cain & Lady Shiva (only wooby sorry)

Maps Mizoguchi & Kyle Mizoguchi

Cass Cain & Mr. Dhaliwal

Diego Perez & Merissa Cooper & Lucas LaPorte

Harley Quinn & Eddie Nygma

Harley Quinn & Amanda Waller

Bruce Wayne & Oliver Queen

Jason Todd & Tyler

Tim Drake & Detective Williams

Cass Cain & Xanthe Zhou

Poison Ivy & White Mercy (& whoever Ivy is dating)

Dick Grayson & Vic Stone & Gar Logan & Raven Roth & Starfire

Dick Grayson & Waylon Jones

any and all pets or animal sidekicks

Other Mainline DC

Favorite characters:

Marcus Shugel-Shen

Xanthe Zhou

Booster Gold

Gary Green

Malik White

Peacemaker

Artemis Crock

Amanda Waller

Favorite ships:

Laura Shugel-Shen/Winston Shugel-Shen

M. Mallah/The Brain

Booster Gold/Ted Kord

Skeets/Buggles

Gary Green/Casey MCU

Captain Cold/Heatwave

Vic Stone/Gar Logan

Zari Tazari

Felicity Smoak/Chloe Sullivan

Favorite gen relationships:

Marcus Shugel-Shen & his parents

Marcus Shugel-Shen & the Ultra-Humanite

Marcus Shugel-Shen & Billy Batson

The Legends Crew

Xanthe Zhou & John Constantine

Black Adam & Malik White

Uncle Leek & Lay-lay

Peacemaker & Adebayo

Peacemaker & Red Bee

Artemis Crock & her parents

Vixen & Bumblebee (& Beast Boy)

Clarion & Teekl

Non-Mainline DC

Favorite characters:

John Constantine

Virgil Hawkins

Tim Hunter

Lainie Belloc

Death of the Endless

Favorite ships:

Virgil Hawkins/Richie Foley

Lainie Belloc/Mona Doyle

Lucifer/Maze

Favorite gen relationships

John Constantine & his family

John Constantine & Chas Chandler

John Constantine & Tim Hunter

Lucifer & Lainie Belloc

Lainie Belloc & Cal

Death & any character who canonically died

Other Fandoms I'm Thinking About Right Now

Murderbot Diaries

Only Murders in the Building

Avenue 5

Cookie Run: Kingdom

my original stuff but I don't know if you can follow that

I'm open to pretty much anything, but I'll let you know if you hit on a NoTP or a squick or something, or if I don't know the fandom. This list will change as I think of different things or my interests change, but you're still welcome to ask me about any of it. Or anything else I've written about. Or haven't written about.

Lately I've been writing 1-2k in response to ideas usually. I'm trying to get myself to write drabbles and flashes but it's not working so likely if you ask you'll get something fairly long.

Anyone's welcome to ask for a fic even if we've never interacted before. Both specific and general prompts are welcome, and I like writing Gen content of all kinds as well as ship content, character studies, and worldbuilding.

You're also welcome to just ask me questions about my fandoms (or my original fiction).

[mywifeleftme]

126: Don Gibson // Oh Lonesome Me

Oh Lonesome Me Don Gibson 1958, RCA Victor

The back cover blurb is a lost art in today’s record design business, and I think it stinks! How many generations of music buyers have been robbed of the opportunity to read some record producer or anonymous A&R flack hyping up Kool Keith as a “talented young man with a sound that is really out there” or Radiohead as “the next James”?

I bring this up as I look at the back of Don Gibson’s Oh Lonesome Me, which features an ‘introduction’ to the man behind the music by Lowell Blanchard, the station manager at WNOX, Knoxville, Tennessee, where Gibson had worked on “The Midday Merry-Go-Round” programme for the past seven years. Although the album contains two all-time country standards in the title track and “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” Blanchard’s write-up reads more like a letter of reference for an applicant to the pipefitter’s union. “I think you’ll enjoy Don’s album,” Blanchard concludes. “It’s good music by a nice guy who likes people.” That’s very mild flogging for the album that launched both Gibson and producer Chet Atkins to stardom, and inaugurated the Nashville Sound that would dominate country music for the next two decades, but perhaps Tennesseans are a more reserved people than I’d figured them for.

A friend who’s weathered my periodic bouts of Gibson mania calls him “Buddy Holly as an Adult Man,” and I think that’s pretty good; stripped (by Atkins) of the usual fiddles and steel guitars, Gibson’s sound is as legible as rock ‘n’ roll as it is country. He was a fine singer, if not a particularly distinctive one, but as a songwriter, he was a wonder. It’s no exaggeration to say every Gibson song is fundamentally about the same thing, or that pretty much all of them are maddeningly catchy. Nicknamed “the Sad Poet,” the large-domed chanteur wrote fizzy hit after hit about the car door being slammed on his (emotional) dick. It’s hard to choose a favourite sadsack Gibson lyric: “Give Myself a Party” maybe, in which he throws a solo rager with all the stuff his ex left behind; or “(I’d Be) A Legend in My Time,” one of several songs where he turns being a loser into a competitive sport. Despite this artistic fixation on misery, his lyrics aren’t a baroquely weird psychic mess like Roy Orbison’s (a fan who once recorded an entire LP of Gibson covers); his writing has such an elemental simplicity any performer can make them their own. That’s why he’s such a popular cover choice, with “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” alone having been recorded over 700 times.

Still though, I tend to prefer Don’s steady, reliable takes to those of his interpreters. Oh Lonesome Me has a lot of his biggies (including both “Bad, Bad Day” and “Blue, Blue Day”), and with Atkins’ eye on not only the country but the pop charts, everything gets the star treatment. The (cut me into little pieces and mail me around the country) unsung heroes are Elvis Presley’s backup singers, the Jordinaires, who hang a heavenly gauze over the ballads and lend the fast ones a bubbly excitement. It doesn’t hurt having Atkins, the ace of session ace guitarists, sitting in either—his jazzy, Les Paul-ish licks on slow blues “Heartbreak Avenue” are an absolute treat.

I’ve got quite a few Gibson records on my shelf, and you can’t really go wrong with any of his ‘50s and ‘60s output, though things get a little ropey by the ‘70s. To name but two, the ’63 compilation I Wrote a Song is a desert island disc for me, and Girls, Guitars and Gibson from ’61 is every bit as good as Oh Lonesome Me despite not being quite so laden with hits.

126/365

[reidio-silence]

During the previous year the school department had proposed that several hundred black students from three severely overcrowded schools in Roxbury and North Dorchester (the Endicott, Greenwood, and Gibson schools) be bused to nearby schools in Dorchester and Brighton. The school committee at first had approved but then in August 1965, responding to phone calls and visits from aroused white parents, voted against the plan and instead proposed that an abandoned Hebrew school in Dorchester be purchased and that the black students be sent there. The thirty-two-year-old Beth El School would cost $175,000 to buy and renovate and an additional $100,000 to staff and supply. Transporting black students to underutilized white schools would cost far less, but the committee earlier had tried to avoid that remedy by proposing double sessions or reopening a sixty-four-year-old public school to relieve black overcrowding. Superintendent Ohrenberger, Governor Volpe, and Mayor Collins all opposed these options, and warned the school committee that it might now be engaging in acts that a court would eventually find to be deliberate acts of segregation.

At this point a group of black parents decided to bypass the committee. Parents from the overcrowded schools, led by Mrs. Ellen Jackson and Mrs. Betty Johnson, organized the privately funded busing of black children to underused white schools. Under the city’s open enrollment policy—which Hicks and school officials continually pointed to as evidence of the lack of discrimination—any student could transfer into a school provided there was space available. The catch was that the committee did nothing to aid black transfers and, indeed, much to obstruct them. But in early September the Boston Globe pitched in by publishing detailed tables showing where vacancies existed in every school in the city, and the new grassroots program, called Operation Exodus, began. It initially moved eighty-five students with donated buses and car pools. By September 12, two hundred students were involved. By 1966 money was coming in from the unions, suburban liberals, and bake sales and spaghetti suppers held by the black parents. At its peak, Operation Exodus would involve over six hundred students.

Hicks and other white politicians misrepresented Operation Exodus and consequently, in many areas of white Boston, it was not perceived as a black bootstraps effort. It seemed rather part and parcel of what blacks and “outsiders” were trying to foist on the city. Hicks promoted obfuscation by lashing out against the “Negro leaders” she claimed were “misinforming parents and telling them half truths” about overcrowding; she distorted the fact that the leaders in this case were parents. The committee also threw obstacles in Operation Exodus’s path at the last minute by, for example, requiring that children could not be transferred without “official” transfer slips. On September 9 Hicks made a dramatic appearance, with police escort, at the Blue Hill Avenue headquarters of Operation Exodus to tell the black parents that “without these yellow authorization slips, your children will be turned away by the busload.” Despite protests by white parents and Hicks’s obstructionism, Operation Exodus continued.

— Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing (1991)