San Francisco Symphony Mar 19, 2020 American composer Charles Ives created his Holidays Symphony as a haunting sonic portrait of New England at the turn of the 20th century, at turns sentimental and chaotic. Michael Tilson Thomas explores the riddle of Ives the loyal son and businessman versus Ives the musical maverick who made listeners confront their understanding of what music could be. Filmed on location in New England and New York City.
Keeping Score | Charles Ives: Holidays Symphony
The Language of the Soul with Betty Kovács
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 18, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic/mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. In this 2020 video, she explains that the Mundus Imaginalis is a layer of reality that exists between the pure, formless world of spirit and the physical world of our senses. It consists of archetypes, dreams, and symbols. Its manifestations are evident in the earliest cultural remnants, such as cave paintings. This imaginal world is far more real and different than fantasies and imagination. It speaks to us in the preconceptual language of our soul. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on December 23, 2020)
Poetry: I Too, Dislike It
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.
Emily Levine (Portrait by John Keatley)
Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.
When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.
But it was the first poem Emily ever read to me, to break me in, that stands as eternal testament to her spirit, to the playfulness with which she approached even the most poignant aspects of this life.
Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972) was in her early thirties and the world had just come undone by its first global war when, reckoning with the eternal question of what the point of art is in these matters of life and death, she composed this perfect poem — a vindication, a consecration, and, perhaps above all, an invitation:
POETRY
by Marianne MooreI too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us — that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician — case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion —
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then savor Emily reading the ravishing “You Can’t Have It All.”
In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:
Learn something.
Help someone.
Feel it all.
We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehension and emotional intelligence — to be capable of empathy, as well as self-compassion.
The damage of our time is that it pragmatizes everything, reducing the wonder of curiosity to the practical application of discoveries, reducing the symphony of feeling to the hold music of self-help, reducing human beings to data points in a log of user statistics and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only antidote to which is a passionate defense of the irreducible things that make us human — those things useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical value to apprehending the magnificent eye of the scallop or the mystery of the ghost pipe, no practical value to Leaves of Grass, yet these are the things that mediate the worst propensities of our kind — our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.
A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first global war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of utility. We didn’t then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription Russell offers in his wonderful essay “‘Useless Knowledge,’” later included in the altogether revelatory collection In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (public library).
Bertrand Russell
Observing that the Renaissance was so transformative because its “main motive” was delight — “the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers” — and that the Enlightenment was so transformative because it probed the workings of the universe without expectation of practical gain, he writes:
In a sentiment he would soon develop in his excellent essay on the value of idleness, he adds:
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss
But while the usefulness of “useful” knowledge in making the modern world cannot be denied — here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-growing life-expectancies — we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, not more productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:
Several years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga composed his revelatory treatise on how play made us human, Russell adds:
And yet play is an active rather than passive form of leisure. In a prophetic sentiment anticipating the menacing mesmerism of social media, the way it would turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he observes:
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a solo print and more.
Half a lifetime before he looked back to reflect on the key to growing old contentedly — “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life” — he writes:
Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bullies and lynchers with fallow minds would take the reins of superpowers, waging wars by whims and feeding the fragile ego’s lust for power by terrorizing the powerless. But he did give us, as plainly and precisely as possible, a prescription for prevention:
Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat
Describing what Iris Murdoch would later term “unselfing,” which she identified as the chief reward of engaging with art and nature, he adds:
These contemplative acts of unselfing, Russell notes, have “advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound, [from] minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates [to] the difficulty of securing international co-operation.” In passage evocative of physicist Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower, he reflects:
[…]
But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster. For those to whom dogmatic religion can no longer bring comfort, there is need of some substitute, if life is not to become dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertion.
In a passage of overwhelming prescience, he adds:
Complement with Russell on the secret of happiness, the two pillars of human flourishing, how to heal an ailing and divided world, then try an astronaut’s antidote to despair.
The Dalai Lama on being alive
Can We Stop Democratic Backsliding?
Image credit: Dibyangshu SARKAR / AFP via Getty Images
| Understanding Democratic Backsliding For the last two decades, democracy has been in retreat. Autocracies now outnumber the world’s democracies, and countries that had made impressive democratic strides have been purposefully undoing those gains. Most confounding, this global democratic recession has been driven not by traditional coups but by elected leaders themselves. Yet we have seen bright spots—notably, last month in Hungary and, before that, in Poland in 2023. To turn the tide back toward democracy, we must first understand what is driving democratic backsliding and how it is carried out, as well as what prodemocracy leaders and citizens can do to counter these forces. The following Journal of Democracy essays, now free for a limited time, do just that. |
| On Democratic Backsliding Old-fashioned military coups and blatant election-day fraud are becoming mercifully rarer these days, but other, subtler forms of democratic regression are a growing problem that demands more attention. Nancy Bermeo Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy Today, the principal challenge to democracy is coming not from coups but from democratic erosion driven by elected leaders. What is behind this shift, and how can prodemocracy forces push back? Susan Stokes The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding Can we recognize the symptoms of backsliding before it’s too late? Though the signals are sometimes faint, a new study of sixteen cases around the world reveals key dynamics common to all. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all. Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability. Francis Fukuyama. Chris Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni Why Democracies Survive Democracies are under stress, but they are not about to buckle. The erosion of norms and other woes do not spell democratic collapse. With incredibly few exceptions, affluent democracies will endure, no matter the schemes of would-be autocrats. Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao The Danger Is Real Analysis that subtly defines away problems is not going to help democracies survive the threats they now face. The fear is warranted. Yascha Mounk Questioning Backsliding It is no easy feat to agree on how democratic backsliding should be measured. No surprise scholars are coming up with strikingly different results. Nancy Bermeo The Value of “Tyrannophobia” Democratic death has been exaggerated. But fear that a democracy is going to break down may, ironically, be one of the things that protects it. Tom Ginsburg Follow the Leader Democracies are increasingly under attack by the leaders they elect. We may not know the damage until it is too late. Susan D. Hyde and Elizabeth N. Saunders A Quiet Consensus We welcome the common ground. The challenge ahead is to protect democracies genuinely in peril, while not losing valuable time and resources chasing authoritarian ghosts. Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao The End of the Backsliding Paradigm Like the “transition paradigm” before it, the concept of democratic backsliding threatens to flatten our perceptions of complex political realities. Examples from East-Central Europe illustrate the ambiguous dynamics at play in many troubled democracies. Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley How Much Democratic Backsliding? Democracy’s retreat is real, yet alarmist reports of a global demise or crisis of democracy are not warranted. Valeriya Mechkova, Anna Lührmann, and Staffan I. Lindberg |
Hafez on the 10,000 idiots living inside you
(gabrielamgutierrez.substack.com)
“It is always a danger
To aspirants on the Path
When they begin
To believe and act
As if the ten thousand idiots
Who so long ruled and lived inside
Have all packed their bags
And skipped town
Or
Died.”
~ Hafez
Khajeh Shams-od-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi[a] (1325–1390), also known by his pen name Hafez,[b][2] was a Persian lyric poet whose collected works are regarded by many Iranians as one of the highest pinnacles of Persian literature.[3][4] (Wikipedia.org)
Study: Most Men Believe They Could Seduce Bear If Life Depended On It
Published: May 15, 2026 (TheOnion.com)
DENVER—In an expression of overwhelming confidence in their innate animal magnetism, the majority of men who participated is a study published Friday by researchers at the University of Colorado stated that they could seduce a bear if their life depended on it. “Nearly 70% of male respondents claimed that if they encountered an aggressive grizzly in the wild and push came to shove, they would be able to win the affection of the charging animal with nothing but their raw sex appeal,” said lead author Peter Wilmore, explaining that most study participants aged 18 to 65 admitted that it might not seem like they could slip into thigh-high stockings, throw on some cherry red lipstick, and charm the pants off of a North American brown bear, but they were nonetheless convinced that if it was absolutely necessary, they would be able to lure one of the large mammals into their embrace. “Despite any previous indication that they had any game whatsoever, these men insisted that a surge of adrenaline and a flash of their ‘just-fuck-me’ eyes would be all they would need to entice an enraged mother bear protecting her young to sleep with them.” Wilmore warned men to seek the help of park rangers when attempting to get a bear to come home with them and make love all night long.
Story of the Week: Tree
When a 15-Year-Old Martin Luther King Jr. Confronted Jim Crow on a Train
Lerone Martin on Segregation Aboard the Southern Railway
Lerone Martin May 11, 2026 (lithub.com)
At some point during Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1944 train trip from Atlanta to Simsbury, Conn., the hungry, rambunctious teenager left the company of his fellow Morehouse students and went to the state-of-the-art dining car to enjoy Southern Railway’s fine dining on wheels. He had no idea what was awaiting him.
The tagline of the Southern Railway Company was “Southern serves the South.” The company motto referred to more than just geography, but also the “Southern way of life.” The Crescent offered the first dining cars on trains departing Atlanta beginning in the nineteenth century. And the company had no plans to change its nineteenth-century segregationist roots. The observation and dining cars were designed to resemble a hotel tavern-lounge, inviting passengers to relax and enjoy complimentary coffee and orange juice, or alcoholic beverages for purchase. Usually, a crew of twelve workers handled the wood-fired kitchens and table service. They served traditional Southern cuisine and traditional Southern mores. African American men often labored in these environments— as servers or cooks—but African American passengers like ML were not welcome.
Access to these spaces was heavily policed. Black passengers could procure food on board but, as Du Bois summed up for readers in The New Republic, “it is difficult.” William Pickens, the NAACP director of branches and assistant field secretary, chronicled how difficult it was even to purchase decent food and beverages during an interstate Southern train excursion. He was “gruffly informed by the trainmen” there were “no sanitary drinking cups” offered in the Jim Crow car.
It is evident, the NAACP concluded, if you are a Negro, there are “practically” no accommodations made for dining on the train.
When the car made intermittent stops at train stations so passengers who were, as Pickens noted, “too stingy to pay the dining car prices and the tips” could get food, Black passengers discovered that station lunchrooms across the South only served white passengers. “As if fate had conspired with the devil,” Pickens noted, “the Jim Crow car stopped right in front of this lunchroom, so that the starving colored traveler could see the white passengers go in and out and observe their backs as they sit at the counter and drink their hot teas and cold milk and eat their warm food.”
And worse, these white customers were nearly always “served by black hands.” Pickens noted the mind-blowing hypocrisy: White passengers could “eat food out of black hands,” but would not “eat their own food out of their own hands if a black man at the other end of the counter is eating his own food out of his own hands.” To add “indigestion to insult,” a few minutes before the train resumed its journey, without fail “a Negro servant is sent out from the lunchroom with a basketful of cold food, which could never be sold to white customers, in an endeavor to get rid of it among the colored passengers.”
Indeed, while “white passengers in the lunchroom may get a hot drink or a warm egg sandwich for a few cents,” Black passengers were offered “impenetrable” chicken that had been “fried day-before-yesterday, old bread, and a slice of musty pie actually cut days ago” for seventy-five cents. If one dared to purchase such disposable fare, there was no way to consume the offensive food with dignity. If African American passengers requested utensils or a napkin they were told “No!” Railroad employees were not permitted to “bring dishes into the Jim Crow car.” It is evident, the NAACP concluded, if you are a Negro, there are “practically” no accommodations made for dining on the train.
The violence employed to police these spaces was legendary in the national Black press, especially in ML’s hometown. Atlanta’s Reverend Martin L. Harvey, who served as Dean of Men at Atlanta’s Clark College, was severely beaten for lounging in a tavern car in 1943. As his train from Chicago approached Atlanta, the train conductor shouted at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion national youth director, “Go back to the place where you belong.” The minister told the conductor his ticket class entitled him to access. But that all changed once the train entered the South. The conductor was incensed. With all his might, he rained down curses and punches upon the minister. When that proved insufficiently destructive, he grabbed a metal ashtray stand and preceded to beat the bespectacled Harvey. Black passengers and Black citizens were horrified by the measures railroad officials were willing to employ to maintain Jim Crow.
Animals do not dine at tabletops. Human beings do.
For this very reason, many African American travelers adopted “Jim Crow travel kits.” This repertoire of items included clothes as well as food, beverages, and utensils, enabling Black travelers to approximate humane travel. For decades, Black passengers exchanged suggestions and warnings via word of mouth in barbershops, beauty parlors, train depots, churches, and even the Black press.
In 1922, Reverend Bowler took to the pages of the national Chicago Defender to advise Black passengers to leave nothing to chance or the whims of railroad employees or law enforcement when traveling the rails. His Jim Crow traveling kit kept him prepared for anything the Jim Crow car threw at him. In addition to a pair of overalls, he also carried a miniature gas stove and tabletop. He explained, “the dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned because white people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water for several days.” He continued, “I cannot force myself to sneak to the back of some depot kitchen like a little poodle and ask for food; neither can I take a chance of being shot to death for attempting to invade a dining car to secure my meals.”
Therefore, Reverend Bowler stocked his luggage with salmon and canned goods, using his stove to prepare meals during his journey. Reverend Bowler’s Jim Crow traveling kit served several purposes: It helped him “ward off hunger,” while also helping him to maintain a semblance of dignity, and ultimately protect his life from the vicious vigilance of white supremacy. And the small tabletop brought a sense of dignity and propriety to the meal. Animals do not dine at tabletops. Human beings do.
In 1943, The New York Amsterdam News gave Black readers an upgraded approach: shoeboxes. Black passengers could carry their food aboard in shoeboxes, giving Black passengers the urbane appearance of a boxed lunch, the kind many railroads and train depots sold. King Hayes, a Morehouse student, recalled doing just that for his trip from Georgia to Simsbury, “ration[ing]” his food for the entire trip north. Such Jim Crow “hacks” increased the chances of survival, but did little toward achieving legal equality.
ML’s mother probably equipped him with a “shoebox” meal filled with his favorites—soul food to fill his stomach and protect his body and soul from the ravages of white supremacy.
But something led her son to try the dining car. Maybe the simple basic urge of hunger led him there; he was, after all, on a twenty-four-hour trip. Maybe curiosity led him there. It could have been a combination of desires. Whatever his reasons, as he made his way through the aisles and cars, he had no idea of the absurdity that awaited him.
In addition to violence, Southern Railway began deploying innovative ways to maintain separate and unequal dining service across its Southern routes. In 1942, Southern Railway issued new dining regulations to ensure separate and unequal dining experiences. The railroad was experiencing unprecedented demand for food as the number of train passengers swelled with the war effort. At the outbreak of war, the railroad served a total of 70,000 meals a month. When ML boarded the train in 1944, that number had increased to 350,000 meals a month, making it extremely inconvenient to host racially segregated mealtimes.
Southern’s new policy instituted segregation curtains in their dining cars. One or two tables nearest the kitchen were designated for Black passengers with a “Reserved” placard, enclosed by a heavy, thick blue curtain, while the remaining eight to ten tables were set aside for white passengers. The slim veil symbolized the gulf that existed between Black and white in America. Like the Jim Crow combination cars, these curtains kept the dining car segregated, while also thinly veiling America’s commitment to separate and unequal.
The opaque curtain was a gift to white passengers. Some claimed the sight of Black untouchable diners made them “nauseated.” The separation pampered white prejudices and soothed white conscience and stomachs. White comfort required Black dehumanization. It is easier to dehumanize flesh and bone, soul and spirit, when it is rendered invisible. Those on the outside cast their worst and wildest dreams and fantasies about the “things” dining behind the veil; while those inside the veil had to muster all their soul force not to believe what was forced upon them at every turn. The very human desire to eat required Black riders to dehumanize themselves. And if Black passengers dared to pull the curtain aside, the dining car steward would hurriedly pull the curtain closed, or worse. Protecting the sense of superiority of white passengers was the top priority.
The company’s new rules also made sure that their Southern cuisine overwhelmingly went to white passengers. Before the start of each meal, the porters pulled the curtains into “service position,” enclosing the “reserved” seats. White passengers were served first. If the white diners took all the “white” tables, “the curtain [was] pushed back, cards removed, and white passengers were served at those tables” formerly reserved for Black customers. This was inevitable on crowded war-era trains. If white travelers “fully or partially occupied” the table, “colored passengers” were “advised that they will be served just as soon as those compartments [were] vacated.”
Or, if food was available, “colored passengers” would be served at their seats “using a portable table, without the extra charge,” as soon as staff were available. This rarely happened. Southern Railway testified in court that 85 percent of the company’s white diners were served at least two helpings before Black consumers could even place their first order.
The Southern Railroad Company utilized circular logic to justify the policy. They reasoned that “relatively few Negro passengers” desired to eat in the dining car, making it pointless to reserve significant tables for the “exclusive use” of Black passengers. The proof was in the data they cooked up. Over a ten-day period, they conducted a study of 639 serving periods on all Southern Railway trains, which revealed “about 4% of the total meals served were served to Negro passengers.” The railroad did not acknowledge that their policy, not the lack of Black hunger, contributed to the low rate of Black patronage.
The company, with seemingly no federal accountability, deployed anything and everything—from violence to self-fulfilling studies—to continue to starve Black passengers of food and a sense of “somebody-ness.”
Nevertheless, in a lawsuit accusing them of discrimination, they maintained they were being falsely criticized. Southern was not racist nor lawless, they argued, but generous by reserving 10 percent of their dining-room seating (four seats out of forty) to “Negroes,” even though Black customers rarely patronized the dining car.
A few months before ML boarded the Crescent, a Black lawyer, Elmer W. Henderson, filed a complaint with the ICC regarding the train’s racist dining policies. Henderson had been denied seating in the dining car of the Crescent because white patrons were using one of the two tables “reserved” for Black patrons. Henderson was promised he would be informed when the negro table became available. He was never informed. The ICC did nothing to change the policy, declaring that Henderson was the victim of a subpar employee, not a racist dining policy. The company, with seemingly no federal accountability, deployed anything and everything—from violence to self-fulfilling studies—to continue to starve Black passengers of food and a sense of “somebody-ness.”
The policy had its intended effect on ML. He managed to get food while on board, but the cost was beyond anything he intended to pay. When the train staff issued the “negro call” for the dining car, ML began his journey from the dilapidated settees of the Jim Crow car to the plush seats of the dining car; from the stench of the Jim Crow car to the culinary aromas of the dining car. Surely keeping his parents advice in mind, ML probably kept to the racial etiquette of day: No sudden movements. Step aside for all white people. Make yourself small. Do not stare. Do not linger. Walk deliberately, but not too fast. Refer to all white people as Mr. or Mrs. Be sure to remove your hat. Don’t stand in the white line. Do not expect reciprocity. With all the boxes checked, ML arrived in the dining car.
Yet, the teenager who had been raised to believe that he was as good as any other human being was quarantined behind the veil of the dining car. “The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car,” he remembered, “I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my self hood.”12 The system of segregation robbed him of his dignity and humanity. The curtain made him feel like he was simply a thing.
And his failure to protest the system also chipped away at his sense of self hood. ML found himself complicit with white supremacy. He endured humiliation and degradation just for a meal. No matter how good the food may have been, one can’t feel satisfied when one has to forfeit their own humanity.
It is easy to imagine the teenager, once again saying to himself, “One of these days I’m gonna put my body up there where my mind is.”
But no one, especially not Southern Railway, took note of the internal yearning of the fifteen-year-old. The train, like life, continued to roll along the tracks of Jim Crow America.
But ML did manage to lift his mind. Through the windows of the Jim Crow car and the dining car, he took note of the things that amazed him, allowing the reader to see the world through his young, astonished eyes. The Crescent took him through the Southern cotton fields his father had escaped. He found himself in awe when the train stopped in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The city had a population of only thirty thousand, much smaller than Atlanta, but as a central hub for the railroad, it bustled.
ML wrote to his parents that he was amazed by the “large” city. The train passed through the majestic haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains, covering hundreds of miles of Piedmont tobacco fields and forest, as well as Civil War battlefields where blood was shed for his supposed freedom, and then up the Eastern Seaboard. Passing through Virginia and Maryland, he marveled at “the many airplanes” he saw, and the size of the navy ships. Lost for words, he compared the military might to the massive structures he knew best. “We saw many large ships,” he wrote home, “some as large as the Bethel Church and larger.”
The next major stop was the nation’s capital, the very seat of American democracy, where an original copy of ML’s beloved US Constitution resided: A Constitution that seemed meaningless in the Jim Crow car.
But when ML and crew changed to the Pennsylvania Railroad at Washington’s Union Station, their citizenship status also changed. Once the Southern Crescent pulled into the station, all trains bound north were emancipated from Jim Crow laws. ML and crew were sprung from the soul-suffocating stench of the Jim Crow car, to await their train to New York City. The clean, fresh air of freedom invigorated their spirits, as they stretched their cramped legs and souls. “It was a different experience altogether,” ML’s classmate and Atlanta native William G. Pickens recalled, “because the Pennsylvania Railroad was not segregated and we could sit any place we wanted to on the trains.”
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Some of the students were so overjoyed, they extended their freedom excursion beyond schedule. According to The Maroon Tiger, the Morehouse student newspaper, several of the young men—the “wise guys,” the student paper noted—claimed they had “accidentally” got “lost from the group in Washington and New York City.” There is no record of whether ML “accidentally” got lost on a freedom excursion in the nation’s capital or the Big Apple. But he was in the midst of an admitted “general” rebellion.
One can only imagine the reaction of the otherwise vigilant Professor Dansby. True to form, he ordered the remaining Morehouse cohort to wait for the wanderlust contingent in DC. He wanted everyone to travel together. The delay caused the entire Morehouse cohort to miss their connecting train. Their arrival at the farm would be delayed costing everyone at least two days’ worth of wages.16 But for many on the journey, freedom from the Jim Crow car was priceless.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. by Lerone Martin. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by Lerone Martin.