The present will sneak up on you. Turns out that U.S. 65 through Pine Bluff has been called the Martha Mitchell Expressway my whole life. So I found out while sorting and reading Paul Greenberg's syndicated columns from 1978.
"It was a typical day in Pine Bluff," he writes, "I went out to lunch at Jones Cafe on Noble Lake with two Communists."
The visitors were Vladimir Brodetsky, information officer for the Soviet embassy at Washington, and Georgi Isachenko, editor of Soviet Life, a magazine still in print as Russian Life.
I can't find a mention of their visit in the Arkansas Democrat or the Arkansas Gazette, and Paul's column doesn't indicate its scope, so I don't know if the men toured the whole state or just visited Pine Bluff. Though U.S.-Soviet relations were warmer in December 1978 than in, say, October 1962, I cannot imagine that the visitors would have been taken to the Pine Bluff Arsenal.
Mr. Isachenko wanted to know how Americans were reacting to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and if people around Pine Bluff were very interested in Soviet-American relations. Not especially, Paul told them, as long as things were going well. People were mostly interested in the Soviet Union as a market for Arkansas' agricultural products. Mr. Jones stopped by the table and underscored the point.
Paul asked about Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet scientist who was not allowed by his government to travel to Norway to receive his Nobel Prize in 1975. Isachenko replied that Sakharov was only after publicity. "One used to hear much the same thing about the civil-rights demonstrators around here," Paul writes. "We have changed; perhaps the Russians could."
Sakharov died in 1989 but has been in the news lately because the Moscow City Court has just ordered the liquidation of the Sakharov Center museum and archives, having declared it a "foreign agent" in 2014.
On the way back to Pine Bluff, the Soviet visitors wanted to know why the expressway had been named for Martha Mitchell. "The Soviets never had an easy time grasping the American outrage over Watergate," Paul writes. "For a while, their official line was that it represented some kind of conspiracy against Detente. Perhaps that is still their impression. For how explain--in Soviet terms--why Martha Mitchell should now be honored for speaking out against those in power?"
. . .
I'm not going to declare my side in the great AP African American Studies fight of 2023 until I have read the curriculum. It's available online. It's taking a long time to read it because I have to stop and look things up. I take that as a good sign.
So far I can't see how studying the migrations of Bantu peoples offers an opportunity for indoctrination, but we'll see. Often, when a college course offering (or major) contains the word "studies," it means that the essence of the study of history is being diluted--the essence of the study of history being the reading and close scrutiny of written documents.
When the subject is African American history, however, there are two facts to consider. First, equatorial Africa during the centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not contain a culture rich in written documents. Second, many (certainly not all) African American slaves were deliberately kept illiterate, in some places by law. They were not able to generate written documents, so integrating the study of folklore, oral traditions, music, and visual art into the formal study of African American history is absolutely necessary.
The study of history is always enhanced by the study of folklore and so on, but you don't want to study New England ballads of 1794 to the exclusion of, say, Jay's Treaty. In the case of African American history, close study of cultural products other than written documents is more than enhancement; it's essential.
So I think I'm going to come out in favor of Arkansas' schools offering this course. The course framework contains an awful lot of educanto, but show me a document produced by the Arkansas Department of Education that doesn't. The teachers are so awash in it they probably don't even notice.
Thanks to Blake Rutherford for raising the quality of the great AP African American Studies fight by bringing Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley Jr. into it. I couldn't disagree more with Rutherford in his attempt to pin responsibility for contemporary American anti-intellectualism on conservative intellectuals, but he elevated the conversation by bringing in three of the greats.