Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins. Book 21 of 2022

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and 

Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins

Nita Wiggins was born in Georgia just at the time People of Color in America became truly equal under the law--the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Her book Civil Rights Baby is the story of her life in an America that took a big step closer to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence of equality for all. 

Throughout her childhood, Nita is an earnest high-achieving student with a goal of becoming a journalist, specifically reporting on sports in Dallas and about the Dallas Cowboys.  Her path to Dallas through Georgia and West Virginia was not easy, but Wiggins tells a tale of achievement and growth, until her dream is realized in 1999 and she arrives at KDFW in Dallas--a reporter and weekend anchor covering the Dallas Cowboys.

At this point in the book, the trouble begins and the villains become vivid.  The latter half of the book is her fight against bosses and colleagues who undermine her and throw obstacles in her path.  

But in the end, her story takes a turn that I could not imagine in an American TV sports reporter. As part of her work in Dallas, she covers Texas-native Lance Armstrong during the years he dominated the Tour de France. Wiggins falls in love with France and Paris and becomes proficient in French. When KDFW ends her contract, Wiggins went to Paris, applied for and landed a job as a professor of journalism at  l'Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.

Since 2009 she has been teaching journalism in Paris and doing other consulting work.

The book is full of stories of her interviewing luminaries of the sporting world, including Muhammed Ali, Evander Holyfield, stars of Dallas Cowboys from her era and from the past, some of the greats of NASCAR, and many others.  

Early in her career, Wiggins interviewed Rosa Parks. The book ends with a lovely play on words that a city needs parks to be peaceful. Paris has enough parks, Wiggins says, Dallas does not have enough: "Dallas also need Parks--enough people with the tenacity to change the system as Rosa Parks had done." 

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Two previous posts about meeting Nita at my favorite bookstore in Paris, the Red Wheelbarrow,  and talking NASCAR at lunch.

First twenty books of 2022:

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

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Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Rome-ing The World, from Kansas, to Iraq, to Kosovo, to the Eternal City

 

Melanie Sanders Meier

The last time I saw Melanie Sanders Meier in person was in 2009 when we were both deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq.  She was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Kansas Army National Guard and was working as an Inspector General on the sprawling air base in southern Iraq.  

This morning we had coffee together in Trastavere, Rome, where she has been a college student since 2015. She messaged me on Facebook on yesterday to say she lived in Rome. It turned out to be not far from where I was staying.  

I knew that after she returned from Iraq (her second deployment) she ran for the Kansas state legislature where she served until 2014.  She then left politics and deployed again, this time to the staff of K4, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.  She was assigned to be second assistant to the commander who was Italian. In fact, all of the twenty people working in her section were Italian except her.  She loved working with the Italian command staff.

At the end of the deployment, she found that she could use the GI Bill benefits she earned from post-9/11 deployments to go to college in Trastevere.  With the housing benefit from the GI Bill and low tuition, she was able to live comfortably in Rome. Next month she will finally complete the communication degree she has been working on since 2015 at the American University in Rome, and in no rush to finish.  

It will be a bachelors degree which she can add to another bachelors degree and two masters degrees. Melanie attended the Command and General Staff College and completed a masters degree in Strategic Studies at the US Army War College in 2015. She worked on the courses at night in Kosovo. 

She may stay in Rome. Melanie has considered Tunisia among possible places to live; she has never lived in Africa. We talked about Spain as a place many American and British expats live. America is not on the list of places where she wants to live. 

Melanie plans to travel Europe after graduation.  It's what college kids do.......