The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

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I attended my first Black History class in 1968 at the University of Maryland. The class came about because black students demanded it in that tumultuous year. They were supported by a small but significant number of white students.

On the first day of class it was a shock to all of us to find out that a southern white professor was the teacher. Because of UM's Jim Crow history, it had almost no black faculty at the time. But Professor Dan Carter turned out to be very knowledgeable and an relentless foe of Dixie apartheid. All of us learned a lot from that man.

In Jean-Paul Sarte's play, No Exit, 3 people are locked in a room together forever. Eventually they figure out that they are in hell and this is their punishment.

If being locked in a room with 2 other people is hell, what do you call it when the room is on fire and you can't get out?

That's what American writer Florence Lasser explored in her play, The Story of the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union). One of the episodes includes the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 when 146 mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women workers were killed because the fire exits were locked. Some of them leaped to their deaths as the flames drew closer.

Since Reverend Wright is not running for office or a place on the Sunday morning gab fests, he can speak truth to power in a way that is forbidden to mainstream political candidates and pundits. Speaking truth to power does not mean that one is always right. Some of his pronouncements are off-base, but he does appear to be speaking from his heart.

Of course one's heart is not where most public political pronouncements come from. Most of these come from the word processors of fresh-faced communications graduates filtered through the mesh of endless focus groups. That way all genuine substance can carefully strained out before being released to the public.

On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger. Monthly Review Press: 240 pages, 2008. $17.95.

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,

But the union makes us strong.

This old labor hymn was written by Ralph Chaplin way back in 1915 and is the unofficial anthem of the US labor movement. It's sung at labor rallies and gatherings, but with an interesting twist. Organizers often pass out songsheets because many of the assembled labor activists don't know the words.

It's a sobering and even embarrassing moment for the US labor movement which is now down to about 8% of the private sector workers. Those who romanticize organized labor based on college history classes or nostalgic folksong fests need to remember that solidarity always begins with a hope....not a certainty.

And if solidarity leads to even a small partial victory, you can bet there will have been lots of hard work, hard feelings and heartaches along the way to that ecstatic moment when the victory celebrations begin.

Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger have put together a book that tells how solidarity really works and that yes, the words Ralph Chaplin penned can become a reality even to those of us who can't remember the lyrics without a songsheet.The book is the product of years of research and writing from a team that consists of a former union organizer and an anthropologist . You couldn't ask for a better combo.

­It's been 40 years since 1968­ and already people are wondering how to remember it. Well, this is how I remember it and some of the years beyond.....

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 I heard the loud thumping of­ footsteps coming up the ­basement stairs of my parents' home in Silver Spring, Md. Something was very wrong. My girlfriend Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It's all over the news. Come downstairs. Now.

A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my
consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God's sake, not
him.

Tracy Turnblad and the gang are back in this latest version of the John Waters classic about desegregation in Baltimore, Maryland during the early 1960's. Hairspray was originally a 1980's film starring Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad and then turned into a hit Broadway musical. The 2007 film is based more on the musical than the John Waters original film. Waters does make a brief cameo in the new movie as a flasher pervert. Anyone who has seen his Pink Flamingos will appreciate the irony.

The story of Hairspray was based on the real life civil rights protests at Baltimore's Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and at the Buddy Dean Show, a dance program modeled after Dick Clark's more famous American Bandstand.

On March 7, 1965 civil rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on US 80 going out of Selma, Alabama. They were protesting the denial of voting rights and the recent killing of a civil rights  activist named Jimmy Lee Jackson by Alabama state troopers.

­The peaceful march was  met by tear gas and riot clubs. Scenes from the carnage were broadcast around the world and eventually led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a huge step forward in the battle for American democracy. Of course the sacrifices made at Selma were the culmination of  years of often deadly struggle for political equality.

I  was born in DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW.  We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont  area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. In  the summer of 2005, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.

My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont  sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950's. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm.

As a kid and well into my college years, going to YMCA Camp Letts near the Chesapeake Bay was one of my central life experiences. One of those experiences was confronting Dixie style segregation.

YMCA Camp Letts sits at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the Rhode River near Edgewater, Maryland. On a clear day, you can see all the way to where the South River meets the Chesapeake Bay. The camp was established in 1906 and has been in its present location since 1922. Many of the counselors came from local Maryland colleges, especially the University of Maryland at College Park.

Generations of DC area kids have sailed its waters, hiked its trails, played Capture the Flag, sat around campfires, short-sheeted one another and told dirty jokes after lights out. It has also served as an adult conference center and outdoor education center for school kids.

I first attended Camp Letts in 1957 at the age of 9. Then it was racially segregated, not uncommon in the Maryland of that time. The Chesapeake Bay beaches near Camp Letts where my parents took me for weekend outings were White Only as were many public acomodations and restaurants. But the Civil Rights Movement was on the march and the walls of Jim Crow were falling.