I’m in Tennessee today, the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which, of course, took place in Tennessee.

I stopped at a drugstore. Stepping out of my car a good old boy, his face framed by a scruffy beard on the bottom, a dirty Tennessee Volunteers baseball cap on the top, approached me. All he said to me was, in a long southern drawl, “You think Tennessee can beat LSU without Candace Parker?”

Candace Parker is the African-American star of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. She’s battling a bad shoulder injury. The Tennessee Volunteers are playing LSU in the national semi-finals Sunday night.

Forty years ago somebody (some people?) killed one of my heroes in Tennessee. Today, a good old boy in Tennessee shared with me that he was worried about the left shoulder of an African-American woman basketball player.

Some unexpected things make me feel good.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Race and Ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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