[Image Description:
The painting “Sappho and Erinna in the Garden Mytelene” by Simeon Solomon, in which a pale woman with brown hair wearing a red dress is held by another pale woman with black hair wearing a yellow dress. They sit together on a stone bench surrounded by nature.]
On this day, 23 November 1969, leading Black Panther Fred Hampton spoke at a meeting organised by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at the University of Illinois. Among those in attendance was Luis Kutner, a lawyer and co-founder of Amnesty International. Unknown to Hampton, Kutner was an informant for the FBI, who reported on the meeting to his handler, and claimed that Hampton was “ranting and raving” and said that President Nixon was “a member of the ‘capitalistic establishment’” and that “Nixon must die”. Kutner said that he was telling the FBI this because of “its possible violation of Federal law”. A few days later, the FBI had Hampton, aged just 21, drugged and murdered in his sleep.
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This sungold is easily the largest most unruly tomato I’ve ever seen. That’s just the one plant babey and is taller than our 6 foot deer fence. It’s planted on the mound so slightly off the ground but still.
In comparison, the sungold planted in the south facing garden in a regular raised bed is about 2 and a half foot tall. The soil also isn’t great in that bed though and the hugel is dressed with fancy expensive organic soil so that could have contributed to the obscene size.
“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.
During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.
On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.
In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”
Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a "sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.
“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.
Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him
and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.
After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.
After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.
Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, "They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.
Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.
For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley
She’s 60 now, she’s still doing activist and advocacy work, and working on a memoir.
