2013 – Brambleman

The Way It Was in the South: 20 years old & going strong

There were about 8,000 hardcover copies published of THE WAY IT WAS IN THE SOUTH: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN GEORGIA. 6,000 of those were published in hardcover by Carol Publishing in NY back in late 1993, five years after the author died. It is my father’s life’s work, and the tragedy of his life is not living to see it completed and published. That task fell to me, his youngest son. The book received great acclaim and won some noteworthy honors. Sales were decent. In fact, all the hardcover copies were sold, some of them twice. (Funny story–buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you how that happened.) The publisher went bankrupt in the late 1990s and rights reverted to the author (in this case, Donald…

Why don’t Cumming city officials use e-mail?

A bunch of old white men run Cumming, the Forsyth County seat. Last year, Mayor H. Ford Gravitt created a controversy by ejecting a citizen who was videotaping a City Council meeting–in clear violation of Georgia’s open meetings act. Politifact even weighed in on the case. Fortunately, Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens has gotten involved to enforce the law, but old ways die hard up in the hills. You can watch the video of the hearing of Olens v. Gravitt on the blog of local activist Nydia Tisdale (the woman with the camera in question), who has taken on the task of “Investigating Corruption in Forsyth County, GA” and does so in loving detail. Given this, it’s interesting to see the following…

Judgment on Brambleman

As you may know, Brambleman recently won the Independent Book Publishers Asscoiation’s Benjamin Franklin Award (which was recently sent back to the shop for repairs). The award went to the publisher, not the author. I suppose I’d be irritated if I wasn’t Thornbriar Press, as well. I’v also received the Benjamin Franklin Award judging forms for Brambleman, which might interest you. The book won the tiebreaker rankings for both editorial and design. Now I should write something else, I suppose. Then again, it’s Friday night. Maybe I’ll just watch a movie–or the Braves, going for win No. 14!

What did you have for lunch today?

This is one of my favorite paragraphs from Brambleman. It comes in the middle of the story, after Charlie Sherman has finished his work on the horrors of 1912 Forsyth, County, Georgia. Now he’s investigating something that is, in its own way, even worse. He’s just interviewed an eyewitness to a crime that had occurred seventy years previously, an event the old man remembers in chilling detail. After the interview, Charlie goes to get some food for the desolate, derelict old guy. When he returns, he sees an ambulance and suspects (correctly) that the old man has breathed his last. Charlie stopped at a park in Cumming and ate the food he’d bought for the dying man. The egg yolk and grits ran…

It’s fixing to get real in Cumming, Georgia

Bring it. Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens is taking on Mayor H. Ford Gravitt of Forsyth over an obvious violation of the state’s open meetings act. Click for background. Olens v. Gravitt Thursday, July 25, 2013 at 9:00 a.m. Forsyth County Courthouse 100 W. Courthouse Square Cumming, GA 30040 Be there! Be there! Be there! Here’s Politifact’s take on the case. It says Mayor H. Ford Gravitt’s claim “We don’t allow filming inside of the City Hall here unless there is a specific reason” is false. Actually, it’s wrong, not false, since that’s what he did. But, as noted in Brambleman, “It is a strange and serious business, to make a lie the truth.” h/t Nydia Tisdale

“Stand your ground” didn’t work so well for black man in Georgia

Update: McNeil has been released from prison in a plea deal that avoided a retrial in the error-filled case. It really just compounds the injustice, however. Click here and here for more details. * * * Even before the Trayvon Martin case, African-Americans were well aware that measures such as “stand your ground” pose a danger to them due to unequal application of the laws. Salon writer Rania Khalek has written about a six-year-old case from Cobb County, Georgia–a suburb of Atlanta–that may serve as a textbook example of this: Not too far from Sanford, Fla., a black man named John McNeil is serving a life sentence for shooting Brian Epp, a white man who trespassed and attacked him at his home in Georgia, another…

Brambleman

Georgia politics, history, and other stuff

Year: 2013