Screening Room (25 page)
Authors: Alan Lightman
1
the Mystic Society of the Memphi: Anecdotal material about the society from interviews with Nell Levy and Jean Lightman, January 15, 2009. Also see the article “The Mystic Society of the Memphi,”
http://www.memphi.com/part3.html
.
2
“Why … did [you picture] the Negro king & queen”: Letter to the editor,
Time
magazine, June 17, 1946. See also
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,793036-1,00.html
.
1
The fellow who perfected this quid pro quo: For a discussion and testimony about Crump’s buying black voters with protection money, see David M. Tucker,
Memphis Since Crump
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 24.
2
upstart Edward Ward Carmak: Crump’s retributions against Carmak and Wallace are discussed in J. Morgan Krousser,
Color-blind Injustice
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 143.
3
“unbridled circulation of obscene and licentious books”: Crump, letter to the editor,
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, November 8, 1946, Edward J. Meeman papers, Mississippi Valley Collection 85, University of Memphis Library, Box 6, Folder 18.
4
“mangy bubonic rat”: This and the following quotation are from Tucker,
Memphis Since Crump
, p. 34.
5
prominent Negro leader Robert R. Church: This episode is discussed ibid., pp. 18–19.
6
“You have a bunch of niggers teaching”: Spoken to James H. Purdy Jr., advertising solicitor of the
Memphis Sentinel
, on October 30, 1940, recorded by James C. Dickerson, editor of the
Memphis Sentinel
, Edward Meeman Papers, Mississippi Valley Collection 85, University of Memphis Library, Box 6, Folder 16.
1
Blanche’s pecan pie: Blanche learned how to make pecan pies from Anne Coleman of Memphis.
1
Two years earlier, a white mob: Discussed in Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Hart Armstrong, Adrienne Clay, Susan Carson, and Kieran Taylor, eds.,
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, vol. 5,
Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959–December 1960
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 34.
2
That same year, in Alabama: Ibid., p. 35.
3
I learned about my father’s quiet pioneering work: The book that discusses Richard Lightman’s work in civil rights in the early 1960s is Selma Lewis,
A Biblical People in the Bible Belt
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), p. 198.
1
“Southern backwater”: This and the following quotation are from
Time
magazine, April 12, 1968.
Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including
Einstein’s Dreams
, which was an international best seller, and
The Diagnosis
, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of three collections of essays and several books on science. His work has appeared in
The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books
, and
Nature
, among many other publications. A theoretical physicist as well as a writer, he has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which works to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia.