I've been sitting on this image for a while; I'm going to use it to illustrate a post on Barack Obama's syllabus for his race and law class at the University of Chicago in 1994, when Stacey Gahegan and I finally get that paper up on ssrn. But I think I want to use it now as a trivia question.
This follows up on my monument trivia question yesterday, which was inspired by Stephen Clowney's paper on race the public landscape, "Landscape Fairness: Removing Discrimination from the Built Environment." Steve talks about parks in Lexington, Kentucky.
This one is very easy. It's obvious what the sign is marking. And I think if you look at the picture closely you can probably make a very educated guess on where this is. But let me ask, where is this park? And once we get this squared away, I'll have some thoughts on Steve's article. One of my questions about Steve's paper, I guess, will be what meaning do we think this park name has now for the neighborhood residents.
Sorry for the off topic post, but if Prof. Massey is going to just post Romney campaign ads, it would be nice if he'd leave the comments open so that folks could try to steer him back to reality a bit before he completely goes off a nutter.
Agreed with PIllsbury.
If you take the President's comments in context, as the embedded ad does not, what Obama is really saying is not that the fine folks here didn't build this blog, but that they didn't build the infrastructure upon which it relies. But maybe Calvin is claiming to have built the internet. Perhaps he and Al Gore have more in common than most would guess.
For the relevant context see http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/what-did-obama-say.html
I'll bite: Charlotteville, VA. The park's name was changed from Washington Park to Booker T. Washington Park in 2001. Though slightly off Professor Brophy's intended topic, I find the practice of "pseudo-rechristening" locations an interesting one (i.e. continuing to call it Washington Park, but changing its nominal honoree.) For another example, see Washington State's 2005 decision to rename Seattle's King County in honor of Martin Luther King over former Vice President (and UNC's own) William Rufus King.
You got it, Owen! And I don't think your comments are off-topic at all. I'm interested — very interested — that this was named for Booker T. Washington as recently as 2001. There's an interesting story behind the park, including that it was established as a segregated park by a person who set up a segregated park for white people:
http://www.aaheritageva.org/search/sites.php?site_id=595