CAN'T STAND FOR TH NATIONAL ANTHEM

Lawrence P. Jackson, Chester B. Himes: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2017) (In light of the Trump's attack on NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem, this struck home: "The Crisis published Chester's 'All He Needs Is Feet' Set in Rome, Georgia, this short story involved the infamous July 1942 beating of the internationally renowned black tenor Roland Hayes, who was accosted by police and local whites after his wife said, 'Hitler ought to get you' to a rude clerk in a segregationist shoe store. Chester re-created the scene by making the violence more grotesque. For calling a tormentor 'Hitler,' a black man named Ward has to defend his life with a knife, an act for which he has his feet set on fire. The story concludes with an Arkansas white man beating a a feetless Ward in Chicago because he fails to stand for the national anthem." Id. at 171-172. "If the police believed in force, many blacks considered resistance to physical assault by whites as 'noble,' their principal right since the abolition of slavery. Chester made an observation that needed to be heard: 'Every race riot in the United states has stemmed from one singe fact that a white law enforcement officer has committed a brutality against a black citizen.' Chester then correctly predicted that a United States capable of electing a black president was thirty or forty years in the future, when Americans then under twenty 'assume control of all aspects of American life.'" Id. at 467-468.).