Word: watermelon
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...Hate." The speech is spliced with scenes from the movies and television shows with which white society tried to teach Malcolm to hate himself, the movies and shows that have taught millions of blacks to hate themselves. There are pictures of Amos and Andy, Steppin' etchit, watermelon eating contests, and cute little Shirley Temple, as she walks into her all white birthday party, telling the slave girls. "I'll be sure to save you some cake...
...command the brickwalk bottleneck between the J. August storefront and the subway entrance on Mass. Ave. But in May 1970--wandering around an almost deserted Harvard and realizing that an organization of intellectually disciplined college students can also be a gaggle of political dilettantes--Jeff Golden began his watermelon summer. Because he did, it's much less likely that his and our paths will cross again...
That summer led him from a sign on a bulletin board in Harvard Yard to southwest Georgia, where brigades of students organized at the Cambridge Institute worked on a collective farm held by black sharecropper families; where, on Featherfield Farm, he weeded peanut fields, harvested watermelons, lived with sharecroppers, and learned about things that he, as a student, had never been close to. He also kept a journal, a present-tense day-by-day record and commentary that, as he finally had to admit to himself, he hoped to publish. With a very little editing, that journal became Watermelon Summer...
...JOURNAL continues through the ripening of the farm's watermelon crop, through the harvest, and through Jeff's enlightening journey to New York with a truckload of melon--where he peddles most of them on the streets, manages to rip the Fillmore East off for an order of 40 melon at $5 apiece, and ends up hawking a lot more from the Fillmore stage between sets of a two-night Grand Funk Railroad orgy. And in a post-script, the journal looks back from April 1971 at what happened to Jeffrey Golden in the summer...
...only way he hopes to be able to help shift the way power is organized in this country. And so right now he's an apprentice carpenter in California; by next year he may be learning something entirely different. Until he does--and until he writes about it--his Watermelon Summer will stand as one of the least affected and most honest accounts of a restless journey to come out of our generation...