Today's Stories

January 2 - 4, 2009

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

Gary Leupp
Base Alienation: Obama's Team of Rivals

Mike Whitney
Bail Out the Economy? More Pay is the Only Way

Karl Grossman
Lost in Space: NASA at 50

Niall Meehan
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Historian, Politician, Censor

Steve Conn
Where Would Larry Summers Dump the Guantanamo Mess?

Uri Avnery
Israeli Elections: Spot the Difference

Corey D. B. Walker
The Politics of Freedom

David Swanson
The Purloined Constitution

Worthy Group of the Day
Socialist Worker

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
January 2 - 4, 2009

Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

We Come From the Sun

By DEE C. LUBELL

Two master writers, two African Americans taking different paths through life's experiences and insights.  Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright show us the variety of life in the African American epic.  Different – yet similar and linked as Hurston writes of living that epic and Wright writes of surviving in it.  Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road and Richard Wright's Black Boy establish that life did not crush their souls.  The might of the sword - their pen - delivered them to universal awareness and knowledge.  Their quest to obtain education and knowledge propelled them on different paths of growth and understanding of the world.  While both search for their human horizons, they come from the sun with distinctive experiences and perceptions. 

Dust Tracks places Hurston's life in a home adorned with flowers, love and self-determination.  This culture and cultivation protected her from the prejudices which lurked on the outskirts of Eatonville, Florida, the only incorporated, all-Black town in America.  This culture provided her a vehicle in approaching the rest of the world.  Dust Tracks captures a Black woman living life through velvet eyes and having the insight and mastery to present the Black family without the intrusion of White America leering at Hurston's tears, laughter, love and hate.  Amelia Marie Adams observes in All About Zora,

Like native anthropologists, she studied her own community, meaning not just the people of Eatonville, but the Afro-American experience as a whole.  Further, by letting the people speak in their own words, she preserved their natural thought, "language" and culture.  Hurston worked not just to record and retell the Afro-American folklore of the South, but also to change the racial attitudes of both Black and White Americans.

Hurston recalls, "mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.'  We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground"; an idea that permeated Hurston's grasp of life.  Her mother, Lucy Ann Hurston, would die in 1900; a death Hurston never forgave, for Lucy Ann was her dear friend and spiritual teacher.  The light of the sun was pushed to the back of her eyes.  Hurston writes,

As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama's eyes would face the east [toward Africa].  I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed was reversed.  Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk.  But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her.  She depended on me for a voice.

For a period of time Hurston immersed herself in tears and hate after the death of her mother, yet her mind was all the time sharp and brilliant with pencil and paper aimed at writing of a world bigger than the world from which she sprang.  Here, Hurston would become the voice for others through penning her books. 

In that other world, Wright’s Black Boy presents the emboldened Wright depicting his youth and times with the horrors of the South, the hunger, the fear, which he hugged close to his heart with bitterness.  According to Wright, "The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful"   Similar to Hurston, Wright sought to change the racial attitudes of both Black and White Americans, yet he embarked on a different path.  Wright and Hurston reflect their differences in discussing their mothers.  For Hurston, her mother’s passing concerns a search for voice ; for Wright, his mother’s illness symbolizes meaningless pain and endless suffering, “freezing his feelings toward his mother”. 

Wright's life begins in 1908 on Rucker's Plantation, a farm near Roxie, Mississippi, 22 miles east of Natchez.  All four grandparents had been born in slavery.  His father deserts the family in 1913 to live with another woman, leaving Wright and family impoverished.  Wright asserts that

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.    

Black Boy highlights life in a country where a young African American boy visits despair after despair upon his entrance to the world.  A baby cries when he is removed from his mother's womb.  Yet, that which would be natural nurturing of the baby until young adulthood is shattered.  As the child grows, we no longer see his tears, yet his heart is pummeled by internal tears.  That peaceful corner of Wright's search for that source of the sun that will embrace a peaceful environment is never reached.
      
Hurston believes that African American women must have the freedom of expression and pen to color their words on paper with the love of their culture.  Hurston's writings increasingly inspired a myriad of Black creative artists; whether it be writing, dancing, acting, etc., the cultural experiences of a people's heritage would be nurtured with a  trajectory from one generation to another.  The African mores and traditions would be preserved in the lives of Black people and carried forward in the pages of numerous literary works.  The tears, laughter, love and hate of Hurston's horizon lives in her writings.  Cheryl Wall writes, "that while Hurston was not the first African American woman to publish a novel, she was the first to create a language and imagery that reflected the reality of Black women's lives" (qtd. in duCille 137).  This significance of Hurston's writings is widely acknowledged. 
      
Dust Tracks illuminates Hurston's stirring view of an environment free of hostility.  This book attempts to liberate women of all hues and she paints a picture of oppressed people's love of life capturing spoken and written words, stories, music, song and dance.  When Hurston exalts with joy at a tender age to live with her brother, she writes: "I shall never forget how the red ball of the sun hung on the horizon and raced along with the train for a short space, and then plunged below the belly-band of the earth".   The words might indeed be considered a Negro Spiritual or Gospel in many homes.  Her style of writing is the image she reveals not just about her life; the imagery reveals all elements around her.  Zora's views color her style - velvety, joy, interest in subjects without hostility. 
      
Wright considers the idea of writing his autobiography following a lecture at Fisk University:

I gave a clumsy, conversational kind of speech to the folks, black and white, reciting what I felt and thought about the world, what I remembered about my life, about being a Negro. . . .  It was not until half-way through my speech that it crashed upon me that I was saying things that whites had forbidden Negroes to say. . . .  Later, I learned that I had accidentally blundered into the secret, black, hidden core of race relations in the United States.  That core is this:  nobody is ever expected to speak honestly about this problem.  

It is that honesty conveyed through the skill of a master writer which empowers Wright's writings.  Black Boy underscores Wright's earlier years living in the segregated South with the pain of hunger that shapes his style of writing - rapid, hard-hitting, focusing on conflict and survival. "I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels.  The north symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed.  Yet, by imaging a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me".  Here, Wright develops a technique that would preserve his prolific writing career – his writings chronicle surviving.  Hurston's writings chronicle life and living.  Both reflect the connection between style of writing and their viewpoints.
      
Hurston travels widely throughout the South and particularly in Florida, gathering tales of African American traditions and lores.   She walks in search of the stories expressed through the eyes of women, for she remains in search of her mother's voice.  Hurston takes an extensive variety of firsthand information and succeeds in preserving the tradition of African American folk culture in the Black Belt of the South.  Hurston colors Dust Tracks with folklore.  After her mother's death she states:

The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death.  Made him with big, soft feet and square toes.  Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere.  Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger.  Made a weapon for his hand to satisfy his needs.  This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things . . . .

While traveling to New Orleans, Hurston states, "I delved into Hoodoo, or sympathetic magic.  I studied with the Frizzly Rooster, and all of the other noted doctors.  I learned the routines for making and breaking marriages; driving off and punishing enemies; influencing the minds of judges and juries in favor of clients; killing by remote control and other things" . 

In discussing findings of pre-historic monsters in phosphate mines, she describes, "Some old-time sea monster caught in the shallows in that morning when God said, 'Let's make some more dry land.  Stay there, great Leviathan!  Stay there as a memory and a monument to Time.  Shark-teeth as wide as the hand of a working man.  Joints of backbone three feet high, bearing witness to the mighty monster of the deep when the Painted Land rose up and did her first dance with the morning sun'".

Hurston claims that

"When I see what we really are like, I know that God is too great an artist for we folks on my side of the creek to be all of his best works.  Some of His finest touches are among us without doubt, but some more of His masterpieces are among those folks who live over the creek".

Wright's writings show a different view - Black people on this side of the creek were never given the fair opportunity to demonstrate their worth.  Without equality of opportunity and the same power of self-determination possessed by the folk on the other side of the creek, we cannot explicate the true worth of the races. Folklore emerges in Wright's story tinted with the toughness of his experiences.  He would tell his grandmother that "If I were to see an angel I would accept that as infallible evidence that there was a God and would serve him unhesitatingly".  Griggs, once a schoolmate of Wright's who obtains a job for Wright, tells him,

"You know, Dick, you may think I'm an Uncle Tom, but I'm not.  I hate these white people, hate 'em with all my heart.  But I can't show it; if I did, they'd kill me. . . .  Once I heard an old drunk nigger say:  All these white folks dressed so fine their ass-holes smell just like mine".

Wright describes how a White man had manipulated him and another Black youth, Harrison, to believe that each was out to cut the other with a knife.  Wright and Harrison talk before there is a knife fight and find out that the White man was trying to have Wright and Harrison kill each other.  They concluded that this was fun for the White men to whom it did not matter if one of them killed the other.  The story goes on - having failed to cause a knife fight, the white men finally have Wright and Harrison box each other for $5.  To White people entertainment is obtained by having Black people kill or fight each other. 
      
Finally, Wright tells a "tale" which probably illustrates his conviction since the age of twelve, "that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering".  The tale, Wright tells us, is of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob.  Vowing to exact revenge, the woman wrapped a shotgun in a sheet and pleaded with the whites to be allowed to take her husband's body for burial.  She was allowed to come to the side of her husband while the whites looked on.  After praying, the woman unwrapped the sheet, and before the White men realized it, she had slain four of them, "shooting at them from her knees" . This tale illustrates that the everyday folklore Wright encountered and passed on were attempts of a people to find wisdom and solutions where their lives were threatened with a dismal existence. 
      
Hurston's treatment of gender reflects sisterhood, strength and self-identity not molded by a male companion.  Here, Hurston's tears, laughter, love and hate are dimensions reflected in the women portrayed in her writings.  Today more than in earlier years, Hurston would be deemed a feminist and womanist, a delineation she would gladly accept.  Hurston's mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, is seen as a nurturing, inspiring, and protective presence in Hurston's life; "jump at de sun" dramatizes a spiritual bonding between mother and daughter.  In a similar way, Wright's love for his mother and Aunt Maggie was admirable.  His mother always encouraged Wright to seek knowledge, as she had been a school teacher in her earlier years.  His understanding of women first emerged at an early age living with his grandmother, a worshipful Seventh Day Adventist.  Wright's mother loved him immensely, struggled hard to survive and to care for her two boys, yet Wright constantly saw fear in her eyes after his father would desert the family.
      
His search for the true African American male and female embraces his efforts to change the world he knew - the  South - that was violently hostile to African American women.  He believed that until fear, hunger, cruelty and rage are consciously resisted, fought against and eradicated from the psyche of the African Americans, their character will further inherit the horrors of life under which African Americans are forced to live and their minds would continue to be controlled and oppressed by the dominant white population.
        
Wright has many jobs and since his youth feels responsible for his mother and brother after his father deserts his mother.  He moves to Memphis in order to work and save money to move his mother and brother.  Once Wright realizes the continued demands hunger places on his family, the urgency to move north - Chicago, Illinois - becomes a reality.  When Wright sojourns to France to build his career in writing, he continues to support his mother and Aunt Maggie until her death in 1958 and his mother's death in 1959.  He would not forsake his mother and aunt, for they were two of the women in his life who would nurture his spirit during some of his darkest days.  Wright's friendship with Gertrude Stein shows his ability to regard women on the same level as men.  That friendship is similar to Hurston's friendship with Fannie Hurst and Mrs. R.  Osgood Mason.  For both Wright and Hurston, the sun did not have a mandatory boundary.

Hurston believed women were oppressed by men and needed to be liberated.  Men were sometimes in competition with Hurston because of her independent thoughts and tenacity in achieving her goals.  She declared once "I am so put together that I do not have much of a herd instinct".  When Hurston asked to borrow a book from a Harvard man and he looked at her in a way that said "what for," he had formulated a prejudicial opinion for a woman; a Black woman reading was questionable.  Hurston believed all areas should be opened to women - there should be no restrictive gender roles.  She also believed women participated in the gender roles that men made women subject to.  She had many male friends who related to her in the artistic or academic fields.  Manning Marable in his book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America states that "Black women appeared no longer as 'auxiliaries' or marginal participants in Black educational, social and political life.  The leading figures of Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Hurston and others provided abundant role models for  young Black girls to abandon the yoke of subordination and sexual subservience".

Though romance was intermittent in Hurston's life, she would identify it when it turned her on.  "But when I fall in, I can feel the bump . . . Love may be a sleepy, creeping thing with some others, but it is a mighty wakening thing with me.  I feel the jar, and I know it from my head on down".  Hurston's first marriage would wane and expire after seven months.  She details her wedding day as not her happiest day that she was assailed by doubts.  Hurston wondered "who had cancelled the well-advertised tour of the moon?  Somebody had turned a hose on the sun" .  Her description of meeting the man she fell in love with is overwhelming, "I did not just fall in love.  I made a parachute jump . . . God must have put in extra time making him up" .  Hurston's unrelenting love would stumble at the door of choosing between romance and career.  Hurston was off to Jamaica to research West Indian Obeah practices.  Yet, she clearly heard the pathos in the voice of the man who had marveled at her mind and spirit.   Hurston states she "tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God" .  What characteristic about Hurston's writings is her ability to embrace love and romance as she passionately deeds her words to her readers.
 
This cannot be said of Wright, as he was always fearful of his surroundings.  His emotions would be subsumed primarily with the financial care of his mother, aunt and brother, as well as protecting his family and self from a flood of hunger, violence and fear.  During his growing up in the South, Wright did not envision building a relationship with a woman as a priority.  Similarly, Hurston would recoil when love and romance would attempt to juxtapose her feminist ideas and leave her at the door of loneliness like many of the women she wrote about.  She would lay love in a contained space and continue to gather her momentum of self-identity, self-image, her work and intellect in order to support her feminist ideology and to hopefully liberate many women.  For Hurston's love from the warmth and brightness of the sun surely had a place; for Wright there was no time or place in space for love.
 
From the mid-1920s to sometime in the late 1940s a literary grouping of African American writers, poets, critics and playwrights existed that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It brought the Black experience, history and culture together and stood for urban pluralism.  Alain Locke wrote, "The peasant, the student, the businessman, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast, each group has come with its own special motives . . . but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another" (quoted in Reuben 7). The geographic identification of this development is not accurate - the African American literary grouping was located both in Harlem and in Chicago.  The time was post-World War I, post-migration from the South to the northern metropolis, and the suffocation of African American arts could no longer persist at the same level.
 
Among the artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance are Langston Hughes, Dr. W.E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Arna Bontemps, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston. The Chicago Renaissance, which sometimes gathered together as the South Side Writers' Group, had Wright as its guiding force and included among others, Willard Motley, William Attaway, Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Ward, Katherine Dunham and Horace Cayton. The two areas of this Renaissance designate literary generations of African American writings - the Harlem literary flowering covering generally the period from 1920 to 1935 and the Chicago movement the following 15 years - from 1935 to 1950.
 
The Renaissance also reflects the broad and deep diversity of views and styles in African American writing.  Different political movements with varying social analyses and personal identities gave birth to varying, and sometimes conflicting literary visions and critiques.  Professor Charles H. Nichols writes,

But the 'young Turks' of the Harlem Renaissance, like Bontemps, Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman and others, were not much inclined to conciliate the bigots and the vested interests of what Du Bois called 'the land of the thief and the home of the slave.'  For after World War I the peoples of African descent achieved a new identity, a more militant social philosophy, a new dignity born of suffering and a sharp vision of their own possibilities.  The Black Nationalism of Marcus Garvey, the Marxism of McKay, the militancy and intellectual power of W.E.B. Du Bois, the pan-African movement - indeed the self-discovery of blacks - created the extraordinary élan and productivity of the Harlem Renaissance.

With this diversity among artists of strong opinions, energy and self-will it is not unexpected that conflicts would erupt between the participants in the Renaissance.  The clash between Wright and Hurston is probably the most publicized.  Both were highly regarded authors whose pens were often lethal as knives.  Hurston attacks the social realism of the 1930s.  She ascribes to Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Sterling Brown a view of Black people as reacting to racial oppression with only a deprived culture.  She describes this group as "the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal".

On the other hand, the Renaissance participants' views of Hurston reflect in the first place their disagreement with the ideology of Hurston concerning the impact of slavery and the racial structure of American society on the African American people.  Unfortunately, this conflict appears to have overwhelmed other significant aspects of Hurston's relationship to the male participants.  However, the artistry and magic of her writings were not ignored.  Langston Hughes, who split with Hurston over their collaboration on the play, Mule Bone, criticizes James Baldwin's book Go Tell It On The Mountain.  In a letter to Arna Bontemps, Hughes writes that if Baldwin's work "were written by Zora Hurston with her feeling for the folk idiom, it would probably be a quite wonderful book".

There always was the dynamic of the domineering male role, which affected the relationship of the Renaissance participants.  For example, in November 1939, Bontemps writes Hughes about a conversation he had with Hurston concerning the gulf between her and Hughes.  He relates "she said her hysterics, etc. were not provoked by you at all, and I believe it.  She said, or intimated, that the whole thing could be traced to old-fashioned female jealousy between her and Louise, jealousy over the matter of influence over you.  When you look at it this way, it is hard to blame poor Zora.  She can't help it if she's a woman".

For Hurston, politics had not the same magnitude as with Wright.  Her silence of political views on such matters as oppression, devastation of the conditions people were forced to live under, also revealed her politics.  She would immerse herself in feminism and womanism and attack that which would affect women across the board.  For the most part white women have not addressed the oppression of Black women, and Hurston would follow that course as well when writing Dust Tracks.  Hurston's tears, laughter, love and hate detailed her predilection of self, of her individualism, and resistance to any one controlling her.  She believed she was the ruler of self.  That idea would guide her life and career, as she surmounted her craft in a milieu of male writers who examined oppression, racism and militancy.  Her primary aspiration rested on climbing a ladder through an approval that would not attack white oppression or make white readers feel uncomfortable.  In Darwin Turner's foreword to Dust Tracks, he critiques Hurston's short-sighted political stance:

in her autobiography one perceives the contradictory attitudes that must be remembered when appraising the credibility of her fiction.  The picture which she chose to paint of herself was that of a fearless, defiant fighter whose father feared the consequences of her impudence; of a woman, loved by whites and feared by blacks; and of an American who transcended the petty conflicts of inter-racial issues. . . .  One cannot believe that any person so violently antagonistic towards such black people as her stepmother, her brother, her sister, and various black women, would never have experienced a reportable conflict with a white person.  And if one did not know that Zora Neale Hurston had written articles against voting rights for Negroes, integration of schools, and the efforts of the Fair Employment Practices Commission to secure jobs for blacks in white firms, one could not soberly consider the shallow conclusions of Dust Tracks. (iv-v).

Hurston's and Wright's different political views are like thunder from differing storms of life as they sought to reach to freedom from a historical past of slavery and a context of white supremacy.  The subject of Wright's writings often consists of the black struggle under conditions of oppression, hunger, deprivation and attack.  Cruelty and violence are the offspring of the oppression that occupies his artistic and intellectual attention.  Wright's politics are often mistakenly presented as communist beliefs.  Wright joined the Communist Party in 1933, at the depths of America's Great Depression.  He was associated with the John Reed Club in Chicago - a left-wing artist and writer's group.  In the early 1940s he leaves the Party and in July 1944 his split becomes public with his Atlantic Monthly article, "I tried to be a Communist."13  Wright's tumultuous life of political and ideological struggles and his voluminous writings reflect the overarching political issue of the relationship of the nationalist and liberation struggles of the Third World and African Americans to the anti-capitalist communist movement and to the traditions of the African societies. 

Wright has a powerful global view: 

The Negro is intrinsically a colonial subject, but one who lives not in China, India, or Africa but next door to his conquerors, attending their schools, fighting their wars, and laboring in their factories.  The American Negro problem, therefore, is but a facet of the global problem that splits the world in two . . . Nowhere on earth have these extremes met and clashed with such prolonged violence as in America between Negro and white. . . . (Les Nouvelles Epitres)

Ten years after his break with communism, Wright tells of a "black colonial Frenchman in Paris" who finds "the French have a great deal of experience in dealing with Communists, but that they shy off in a state of terror when confronted with nationalists" (Black Power 96).15  Wright's view of nationalism exists in contradiction to his advocacy of the destruction of African traditional beliefs and the benefits of the spread of Western society to the Third World.  In White Man Listen he writes,

Bravo! to the consequences of Western plundering, a plundering that created the conditions for the possible rise of rational societies for the greater majority of mankind. . . .  That part of the heritage of the West which I value - man stripped of the past and free for the future - has now been established as lonely bridgeheads in Asia and Africa.

There is no doubt that if Wright were alive today, he would be the first to attack this applauding of western encroachment in Africa and Asia.  Wright was consistently anti-imperialist and the United States and European transnational corporations devastating the Third World today  would receive the same treatment from his writings, as did white supremacy in the United States.  While Wright's views of the road to liberation for Africa and African Americans changed during his lifetime, he always is on that road - for him survival of Africa and the African American requires a successful struggle for liberation. 
      
The United States government recognized Wright's continuing threat to its power.  In 1943 the FBI began an investigation of Wright - his writings, associates, neighbors - which continues until his death in 1960.17  Hurston's world view is dramatically opposed to Wright's view.  She does not see the African American as a colonial subject or tied to Third World colonial wars; nor is she concerned with the force of Black nationalism.  Her views of Africa's traditions clash directly with Wright's.  For Hurston, preservation of and inhaling that tradition are the sources of the life of African Americans.
 
In conclusion, Wright and Hurston present complex challenges to those concerned with understanding the African American, the dynamics of racism and the relationship of artistic impression to context and social stance.  Writing during the same period of time, reaching for the sun, caring for their people - these two master writers see and portray people and interactions differently.  The sources of those differences are real and their existence should not be a surprise.  The interest in the conflicts between Hurston and Wright is the result of a stereotypical view which would require all African Americans to speak with one voice.

Ironically the differences between Hurston and Wright have significantly contributed to smashing that stereotype, while they remained linked by their essential tie to humanity and hope.  Wright writes in Black Boy "Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought.  If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain" In Dust Tracks, Hurston writes:

You who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kindly of those who walk in the dust.  And you, who walk in humble places, think kindly too, of others. . . .  Consider that with tolerance and patience, we godly demons may breed a noble world in a few hundred generations or so.

In my opinion, if that hope fails then we may find ourselves listening to the words of Curtis Mayfield, "If There's a Hell Below We're all Gonna Go.

Footnotes and full citations available at http://www.deelubell.com

Dianne (Dee) C. Lubell is a poet who has recently completed a collection of poetry and essays titled Where the Spirit is in the Water!  She has performed her poetry and storytelling in many venues throughout the country.  Dee is also artistic director of the Temple of Truth Theatre of Voices, a vehicle for children in diverse communities.   She has developed a theatrical environment which bridges history and culture through poetry, theatre, song and dance.  For more information Dee can be reached through her website http://www.deelubell.com; or by email: deelubell@aol.com

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont