Stokely Carmichael Shows Up in Random Spots

I still get a newspaper. For one, I like to read. For two, I like to support old-fashioned (and possibly dying) media. And lastly, Season 5 of The Wire. Like with the Daily News in New York, with my Long Beach Press-Telegram I read the sports first, then the front section, and then the comics.

So, try to gauge my surprise when I got to the comics and read the mostly throwaway "Mother Goose and Grimm" and saw:

The punchline is a pun about "Malcolm in the Middle", but days are few and far between when you can open up your daily funnies page and see Stokely Carmichael's name. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen a newspaper piece about the militant black revolutionary in all my life. My introduction to the leader was by way of the Swedish documentary The Black Power Mixtape. The history of that time period had been washed away from the books.

Oh, you hear about the hippies, and the Vietnam protests across college campuses, but you never hear about the race riots in LA, Chicago, Baltimore, Harlem...the black revolutionaries were far scarier to the white establishment than anything today. As close as you can get today is maybe David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, forcing all players who are injured or inactive for games to be in suits while on the bench, a dress-code specifically for the young black men who were beginning to get a little too proud apparently.

I read "Mother goose and Grimm" everyday, but the thrill of the humor left, for me, maybe fifteen to twenty years ago. I just like the form.