Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger Clinton Jr., is a musician and actor. During his half-brother’s presidency, Roger was given the codename “Headache” by the Secret Service, due to a pattern of engaging in controversial (and sometimes illegal) activities.
Bill Clinton was not alone in being a Democratic president with a controversial brother; in 1978 Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy was investigated by the US Senate on charges of influence peddling with the Libyan government (dubbed “Billygate” by the press).
In 1977, the Falls City Brewing Company began brewing and distributing a brand of beer called ‘Billy Beer’, which was promoted by Billy Carter. Written on each can was the personal endorsement of Mr. Carter:
Brewed expressly for and with the personal approval of one of AMERICA’s all-time Great Beer Drinkers—Billy Carter.
I had this beer brewed up just for me. I think it’s the best I ever tasted. And I’ve tasted a lot. I think you’ll like it, too.
Less than a year later, in October of 1978, the Falls City Brewing Company went out of business.
(I concur with whoever said that drinking Billy Beer was akin to drinking “mule piss with bubbles in it.")
Not in play: in '77 or ‘78, a guy who worked for my dad gave him, as a gag gift, a six-pack of Billy Beer. As far as I know, that unopened six-pack is still sitting in my parents’ basement. I shudder to think about what the contents are like now, 45 years later.
In play: Lillian Gordy Carter, the mother of Jimmy and Billy Carter, was the granddaughter of James Gordy, a plantation owner in Georgia. In addition to his white family, James Gordy had one or more children with one of his Black slaves, and one of his great-grandsons is Berry Gordy III, the founder of Motown Records.
Lillian Carter once said:
Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, “Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.”
According to a paper by Lawrence Finer, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003”, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports, approximately 90% of women born in the 1940s were not virgins on their wedding day. Fifty years later, the percentage of non-virgins had increased to 95%.
-“BB”-
Lawrence, Kansas, home of the University of Kansas, was founded in 1854, seven years before Kansas became a state. Lawrence was founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and was named for Amos A. Lawrence, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, who offered financial aid and support for the settlement. The town immediately became the center of free-state politics, and the town was sacked in 1856 by pro-slavery forces, led by the local county sheriff.
The issue of whether Kansas would be admitted into the Union as a pro-slavery or free state led to the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” It’s estimated 200 people died in this conflict, which became a prelude to the eventual American Civil War. Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1861, after several southern pro-slavery states seceded from the Union.
The 1974 self-titled debut album by the rock band Kansas features, as its cover art, a portion of a mural which appears on a wall of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. The art depicts abolitionist John Brown, a key figure in the Bleeding Kansas conflict of the 1850s.
Carry on my Wayward Son
(It’s on their Leftoverture album)
1854-1859’s Bleeding Kansas (or Bloody Kansas, or the Border War) was a series of violent civil confrontations in the Kansas Territory. It emerged from a debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.
Kansas became a state on 29 January 1861. The 29th of January is celebrated annually as Kansas Day.
The cover of the Leftoverture album is from the mural Tragic Prelude, which appears on the wall of the of the Kansas State Capitol building on Topeka, Kansas. It was painted by John Stueart Curry in 1942.
In a newspaper interview of 1939, Curry explained that “I wanted to paint him as a fanatic, for John Brown was a fanatic. He had the wild zeal of the extremist, the fanatic for his cause—and we had the Civil War, with its untold misery.” Later, he wrote in a letter: “I think he is the prototype of a great many Kansans. Someone described a Kansan as one who went about wreaking good on humanity. This might be the kernel of my conception.”
((Not in play: the Kansas album which used Curry’s mural as its cover art was, in fact, their eponymous debut album, as I noted in my earlier post. Leftoverture was the band’s fourth album, and its cover art (shown below) was created for the album, apparently by an artist named Dave McMackin.))
In play:
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which it was ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools were otherwise equal in quality. The decision served to partially overrule the Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Oliver Brown, with his daughter Linda Carol Brown, is the Brown in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Linda was denied entry in 1950 at the Sumner Elementary School in Topeka KS. Sumner Elementary, now permanently closed since 1996, was located at address:
330 SW Western Ave, Topeka KS
Sumner Elementary was built in 1936 as part of FDR’s New Deal program.
On the map, Sumner Elementary was located at grid coordinates:
39.058056, -95.682222
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was first argued before the District Court in Kansas, which upheld the ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine. When the case was presented to the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined it with four other cases related to school segregation. Lead counsel for the plaintiffs was Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In a unanimous decision in 1954, the Court ruled for the plaintiffs.
In 1967, Thurgood Marshall was named to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. During his tenure as an attorney, Marshall had argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning an astounding 29 of those cases.
The NAACP was formed in 1909 in New York City. Its formation was catalyzed by the then-recent 1908 Springfield IL Race Riot resulting in at least 16 deaths.
Justice Thurgood Marshall’s wife Cecilia Suyat, whom he married after the death of his first wife, Vivian, was a staff member at the NAACP. Born in Maui to Filipino parents, she took night courses in stenography at Columbia University. Because of her dark skin, she said, an employment office clerk referred her to the NAACP in Washington. Her interracial marriage with Marshall “practically broke up the whole organization,” she recalled in an interview for the Civil Rights History Project in 2013.
The Sugar Museum on Maui exists (from its Vision Statement):
To provide an enriching experience to those learning about the history of the sugar industry and understanding Hawaii’s plantation heritage and how it helped shape our current island society. To become a major visitor destination and community educational resource. To provide an outdoor space for the community with a venue for their cultural festivals as well as a gathering place for reunions and other social events.
Another product of Hawaii’s plantation system is the macadamia nut. It was introduced to the territory from Australia in 1882 as a windbreak for sugar cane. Although the tree is relatively delicate (due to its shallow roots) and the shell is the hardest of all nuts (withstanding up to 3000 pounds of pressure), it’s demand makes it commercially profitable to harvest. The Hawaiian Nut Company was the first business to harvest and sell macadamia nuts, eventually being replaced by the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corporation in 1956. Today, South Africa is the largest producer of macadamia nuts.
Agricultural products account for over 10% of South Africa’s total exports. The major exports are corn, wine, grapes, citrus, berries, nuts, apples, pears, sugar, avocados, and wool.