A belated tribute to a great woman - Edna Griffin

After being reminded recently of a person I had not thought of for many years - having left my home town of Des Moines Iowa almost 40 years ago - I submitted the following short article about her to Wikipedia.

Edna was active/proactive in many of the political issues that influenced my political/ideological development. And even, for a short period, seminar leader for the LRY-group I was active in at the Unitarian congregation in Des Moines.

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Edna M. Griffin (1909-2000). For over fifty years a pioneer and champion of human rights, known to many as the “Rosa Parks of Iowa” Her court battle against the Katz Drug Store in Des Moines, Iowa in 1948 (State of Iowa v. Katz) was a watershed event in the civil rights movement.

Biographical note
Edna Griffin was born in 1909 in Kentucky, and raised in rural New Hampshire. She has said that she learned to read by reading The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP. According to Ms. Griffin, she never experienced discrimination in New Hampshire, although her family was the only African-American family in a four county area. Her family later moved to Massachusetts where she was first exposed to negative attitudes regarding race. She was educated at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she received a degree in English. She married Stanley Griffin, a doctor, and settled in Des Moines Iowa in 1947. She had three children, Phyllis, Linda, and Stanley.

Civil rights activism
Ms Griffin has been known to many as the “Rosa Parks of Iowa.” However, seven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and touched off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Edna Griffin in Des Moines had paved the way.
Griffin moved to Des Moines with her family in 1947 where she tired of the open discrimination she experienced. Griffin made it her mission to end discrimination in Des Moines. On July 7, 1948, Edna Griffin, her daughter Phyllis, and two friends, were refused service at Katz Drug Store in downtown Des Moines because of the color of their skin.

State of Iowa v. Katz 1948-49
Griffin launched a campaign to force Katz to serve African Americans by picketing every Saturday in front of the establishment, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. The Polk County Attorney's Office eventually prosecuted the Katz manager under Iowa's only civil rights law, a criminal statute prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. The manager was found guilty by a jury and fined $50. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1949.the case turned into the first successful enforcement of the 1884 Iowa Civil Rights Act.

One week before the Supreme Court ruling, civil rights attorneys Charles P. Howard and Henry T. McKnight, from the local NAACP Legal Redress Committee, negotiated an agreement which successfully ended Katz's discriminatory practices.

Lunch counters and restaurants in Des Moines finally began serving African Americans. This was almost twelve years before the sit-ins at the lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.

These events foreshadowed the modern civil rights movement. Through a combined strategy of direct action, non-violent protest, civil disobedience, and legal action, the movement brought an end to legal discrimination, and the resulted in policies and laws prohibiting racial discrimination. Edna Griffin, who opposed the discriminatory denial of service at Katz, led the way.

Continued activism
Griffin continued to be an active participant in the civil rights movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and a champion of human rights until her death in 2000. Griffin founded the Iowa chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality and organized Iowans for the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. At 75, she went to Nebraska and sat "in the middle of the highway to stop nuclear warheads from being shipped into the SAC Army base," as she put it.

In recognition of her work
Ms. Griffin has been honored with the YWCAs Mary Louise Smith Award; the Community Service Award from Blacks in Government(1993); Urban Dreams' Trailblazer Award (1998); and the Cristine Wilson Medal for Equality and Justice] (1998) [1].In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of her successful desegregation efforts, the Flynn Building, which once housed Katz Drug Store, was renamed the Edna Griffin Building. The same year, Des Moines Mayor Preston Daniels declared May 15 as Edna Griffin Day.In 2004, a Pedestrian bridge in downtown Des Moines was named after her.

Time Lines and the Lense of Time (1)

Time is funny stuff. Although I'm getting pretty old, I still remember a day in 1950, just before my fourth birthday, when I had, perhaps, my first life-defining intellectual breakthrough. It had to do with numbers and time.

At that impressionable age, I was teetering on the threshhold of understanding what numbers were for. I had learned to count: won, too, free, for, five - for the fingers on my one hand. Thith, theven, ate, mine, ten - for the other hand. And even though I didn't have enough fingers and toes to make it entirely relevant, I had faithfully practiced and learned the names of all the numbers right up to a hundred. To top that off I had learned the name of some numbers I couldn't even comprehend, like ninteen-fifty. I was a real intellectual giant ... almost as smart as the big kids (five-year-olds) who went to school ... and I wasn't even four, yet.

On the day in question, for reasons I'm sure I couldn't have understood at that age, as we were talking about years and birthdays, my dad (he was always trying to prod us kids into understanding difficult things), said:

«Next week you'll be four years old. This year is ninteen fifty ... in fifty years it will be the year two thousand .... » he followed this enigmatical statement with a poignant pause ... I just knew something significant would be coming after that pause.

My mind boggled and I tried to think about something else. I knew the number-word «thousand». It meant the same as «zillion» - a totally, incomprehensibly, huge number. Two of them was doubly, totally, incomprehensibly, huge. And to make things worse, it was fifty years into the distant future ... again, incomprehensible ... that's even longer than, than, than ... longer than 'til I am as old as Gail! (she was eight)

Four years I could do. I could count them up on the one hand and still have my thumb left over. And that gave the thumb a special meaning ... next year I would be five years old and then I could use it ... by then I would be all grown up and going to school.

But Dad wouldn't let it slide: giving the mentor scalpel in my brain a final twist, he finally said «HOW OLD WILL YOU BE IN FIFTY YEARS?» My nearly four-year-old mind blanched ...

Of course, Dad helped me muddle through to get the right answer: «fitfy, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, FIFTY-FOUR!» It wasn't hard, and I'm sure I was proud to have figured it out. I was, after all an intellectual giant ....

But for days and weeks afterwards my mind was in a bubbling turmoil. Not because of the 'fifty-plus-four-makes-fifty-four' thing, but because of the fifty-years thing and the year-two-thousand thing, and the age issue. It was gradually sinking in that Dad really believed that I, a little kid, someday in the future might really be fifty years old, or even worse fifty-four. And Dad knew everything there was to know about everything.

When you're little, you have a nice, neat age that you can count on one hand, or maybe - as in the case of my very old and very grown up sister – on two hands, but age was fathomable, countable, demonstratable. But FIFTY, it could just as well be a zillion years old ... do people really live that long?

During the next few days I persued the issues as best I could ... first, I asked Dad and Mom how old they were: thirty-five and thirty-six, they told me. Wow! that was old! But even then, not as o-o-o-old as fifty. In the next phase, I asked them how old Gramma and Grampa were - they were after all the oldest people I knew of. «Fifty-four and fifty-six», came the answer.

I was devastated.

What they were telling me was that I, a totally innocent kid, WOULD ONE DAY BE AS OLD AS GRAMMA AND GRAMPA. And when that came to pass ... it would be in the year TWO THOUSAND! For days and weeks and months I was in a deep intellectual crisis over this revellation. Age meant something different now, and year meant something different, and even my five fingers meant something different. The thumb i had been saving til next year was somehow diminished, too. The very firmament of my four-year-old intellectual world was crumbling under my feet.

Well ... time passed, as it always does, and long before I arrived at the mature age of five the crisis had passed.

But every instant of every day between that day in 1950 and the millenium, I knew for a fact that I would be fifty-four in the year 2000.

Thunderbolt kids - Who the Hell is Bill Bryson?

A couple of months ago I finally got around to reading Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I say 'finally got around to' because as soon as it was published I intended to read it for two reasons: first, I have read some other of Bryson's books, and rather enjoyed them; and second BB and I grew up more or less in the same time and the same place, and I wanted to run his memories past my own.

Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa wasn't in itself particularly breathtaking ... Iowa for most of the world is a long way from anywhere ... and Des Moines doesn't figure particularly high on any scale of newsworthyness.

In a sense neither was the post WWII era of the late 40's and 50's particularly breathtaking nor newsworthy. Coming in the wake of the war years, it didn't seem dramatic. Coming before the Swinging 60's it didn't seem colorful.

When I first came across a book by Bryson, I was interested to note that he, like me, grew up after the war in Des Moines, Iowa; and the he, like me, was an expatriot American living in Europe. How could it be that I never ran into BB during all those years? I knew everybody of interest in DM, didn't I? Was it all because BB grew up south of and I north of Grand Ave. (the great social devide in DM west)? But no, my peer-group and my family sphere came from all over town both north and south of Grand Ave, and East and West of the DM river.

In the wake of my Roosevelt High, class-of-'64 40th anniversary reunion [of course I didn't actually travel all the way from Oslo to the reunion] I exchanged some emails later with my old gang, and enquired about BB ('who the hell is this Bill Bryson, anyway?'). Rosy Ransom was the only one who responded, and she said: "You know ... he's Betty Bryson's little brother". But who the hell was Betty Bryson? All the girls in DM those days had alliterative double initials: RR (Rosy Ransom), KK (Katie Kasten), LL (Laura Lemon), LL (Linda Lee), MM (Marlys Meyers), BB (Betty Bjork), BB (Barbara Britton), BB (Betty Bryson). Still, no bells rang.

At sixty, I consider a 54-year old to be 'my age.' I was born in 1946 and BB in 1952, six years later. For a 16-year-old, no 10-year-old is a peer, nor vice versa. The chances of their paths ever consciously crossing are minimal, no matter how much they move around in the same space. If they keep moving in that space long enough (say, 44 years) the chances become much larger, because the peer potential increases in direct proportion to the ratio δ : α where δ = age difference and α = total age. [Thereby, the peer potential between a 10-yr-old and a 16-yr-old is about 4, while between a 54-yr-old and a 60-yr-old is about 20]

So just because BB and SM were born six years apart, and as adults didn't stay put in DM, there is virtually no way they could have known each other.

...Pity, I think I might have liked the guy.