Ralph among the Wobblies

Until Sunday evening, I'll be at Duke for the Labor and Working Class History Association conference. My smarter colleagues will be holding forth here at Cliopatria in my absence. I'm looking forward to this gathering because I'll be chairing what looks to be an interesting session on ‘Religion, Race, and Class in the Mid-Century South' (scroll down) and there'll be other interesting folks to meet, like Tim Lacy, who blogs at History and Education and U. S. Intellectual History.

This is also the first time that I've really been back to Duke since I left graduate school at UNC in 1972. I hope to see I. B. Holley, who began teaching at Duke in 1948, taught me in the early 1960s, and is still teaching. Most of my friends in Durham's civil rights movement have scattered. Floyd McKissick, alas, is no longer living, but I hope to have dinner with his son, who is now in North Carolina's state senate. I hope to spend some time with Chris Richardson, my virtual son, who graduated from Duke's law school last weekend and gave the student address at commencement. I also hope to have a reunion, of sorts, with some of my students at Boggs Academy, who now live in Durham.

I really prefer these reunions to the 45th class reunion that I missed a month ago. Even after 45 years, I remember all too well who among my classmates crossed our picket lines. If they remember me at all, they remember that the Durham pd repeatedly arrested me and that, essentially, I had to be bonded out of jail for graduation. If I'm not arrested at the lawcha conference, I'll see you here again on Sunday.