Academic

Stranger in a Strange Land

By Alfred Brophy

The subtitle of this post is "law professor in Target."  (Or perhaps it should be "law professor loose in Target.")  I delayed my trip to Philadelphia so that I could stay in North Carolina for today's memorial service for John Hope Franklin.  It was quite an event.  There were some really moving stories--and a fantastically moving speech by Vernon Jordan.  But when I have time, I especially want to talk about former President Clinton's reminiscences, in which he called Dr. Franklin a "happy angry man ... or an angry happy man."   I'm not quite sure what to make of Clinton's talk--but I expect it'll generate some discussion, probably for insight into what it says about Clinton, as well as about Dr. Franklin.  I don't detect anger so much in his scholarship--in fact, I'd say optimism and objectivity are what characterize the works that I'm most familiar with--and an ability to see through generations of dust that had settled on events and caused us to see events as rather different from how they might appear if we looked at them anew, as in The Militant South.  In that way, it seems to me that Franklin was very much a successor to W.E.B. DuBois.  In fact, Franklin was writing his first history at the same time DuBois was writing his later one.

Right after the service, I started laying down tracks for Philadelphia.  So I missed all the excitement about Martha Minnow's appointment as dean at Harvard.  How exciting!  (And all the more so because Dean Minnow's been in the news of late as the source for some of soon-to-be-Justice Sotomayor's thoughts about judging.) 

When I arrived in my hotel this evening, I realized that I'd forgotten to pack my toothbrush and tooth paste.  So, out to the car where -- in part because two of my very best friends embarrassed me into getting one of the gps dodads -- I found the local Target.  Now, I shop at Target every once in a while back home, but this was for some reason a really strange experience.   It was quite deserted (and organized differently from the Target I'm used to), so I was wandering around the store late on a Thursday evening pretty much by myself, looking for the toothpaste isle ... and thinking , what an odd feeling this is.  The store was also new and so the lights seemed particularly bright--it was a real twilight zone feeling. Then, I passed the book section, so I engaged in my semi-annual glance through the isles to see what's selling.  I have to say, not a ton on race or property law.  But a few things that might fit with the law of people magazine....  It'll be nice to be back home in a few days.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 11, 2009 (boomark / email).