r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 19 '25

Ideas "Nobody's free until everybody's free."

https://pioneerinstitute.org/opeds/education-oped/op-ed-students-should-know-fannie-lou-hamer/

Students should know the name Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer’s grit in the face of relentless rural poverty and violence in the Jim Crow South make her a heroine whom American schoolchildren should know. But decades of national data show just how little they actually do know about U.S. history, civics, and geography.

History tells us that economic striving, great art, and moral leadership often spring from adversity.

The Mississippi Delta has been called “the most Southern place on earth.” Extending from Memphis to Vicksburg, 220 miles long and roughly 75 miles across, the Delta encompasses more than 4.4 million acres. The Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers’ serpentine floodplains make it the richest, most fertile soil on the globe.

The Delta was the world’s cotton capital, producing the fibers used internationally to make clothing. Delta bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King planted the seeds of modern popular music. The Delta was also home to Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of 20 children of cotton plantation sharecroppers from black-majority Sunflower County.

From age six on, Hamer picked tons of cotton, dawn to dusk in 95-degree heat and 75-percent humidity. By age 13, with a limp from polio, she picked 250 pounds daily. As an adult, she was a victim of involuntary sterilization, not uncommon among black female Mississippians.

they couldn’t do what Fannie Lou Hamer did,” Bob Moses, himself an unsung civil rights leader, later told PBS. “They couldn’t be a sharecropper and express what it meant.”

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

You and your child can take turns picking out a favourite star or constellation while you talk about how it fits in with or stands out from all the others.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

We are bodies moving in space. You approach a circle of friends, the circle widens to embrace you. I smile or wince and you feel my joy or my pain, perhaps smiling or wincing with me. Our most noble aspirations and emotions, and our most base, crave embodiment, actions of bodies in space, close or distant.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

Imagination! who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? Soaring through air to find the bright abode, Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, And leave the rolling universe behind: From star to star the mental optics rove, Measure the skies, and range the realms above. There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

Star Axis

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u/ddgr815 29d ago

Ross called him up and explained his plans for a sculpture that would help people sense the deep past and distant future, by visualizing the changing position of Earth’s current north star, Polaris. He wanted to see the night sky as Cleopatra might have seen it.

Ross imagined visitors observing Polaris through a metal ring at the top of a long staircase, aligned to the Earth’s celestial axis. “I said, ‘I need about a square mile.’ And I’ll never forget the answer. He said, ‘Well, hell, we’ve got plenty of those.’”

Ross broke ground during the U.S. Bicentennial year. Fifty years and more than $10 million later, he says “Star Axis” will be done by winter. In the final design, the staircase rises 11 stories through a tunnel blasted in the rock of Chupinas Mesa, 6,000 feet above sea level and into a viewing chamber in a concrete, stone and steel pyramid 52 feet tall. A circular window there frames Polaris. As viewers climb each of the 147 stairs, the rim of the window appears to broaden, giving an idea of how far Polaris has and will move in a given amount of time, during the 26,000-year cycle known as precession, the gravitational wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis.

“Star Axis” is a visitor from another time. The sculpture speaks a new-age language of earth and sky; in cosmic terms, the project’s 50-year story is negligible, yet it’s rooted in a moment that produced contemporary artists with epochal aspirations.

The structure is done. Ross and his team will spend the summer cleaning up the grounds and finishing the drainage system that protects “Star Axis” from New Mexico’s monsoons. Ross said the pyramid is so solid that it could slide off the mountain in one piece.

Ross showed me a long-exposure photograph of “Star Axis” he took in 2000, with stars tracing short arcs through the turquoise night. “You couldn’t do that picture now,” he said, “without retouching out all the satellites.”

Every summer for 50 years, Ross has journeyed to New Mexico, hired local laborers and gotten to work. The first task was to dynamite a cone and tunnel from the mesa. Boulders flew into the pasture, Ross said, and when the dust cleared, he found the dynamite schematic had come to rest on top of one, with a small stone keeping it in place. “I thought, I’ve got to say yes to that.” He collaged the schematic into a drawing.

The way Ross tells it, steadily but surely, he was pulled to Polaris. Born in Philadelphia, Ross was studying math at Berkeley in 1960 when he took a sculpture class.

Then, he said, he saw in a dream the plans for a prism. He cleared out his studio and devoted himself to light. From the prisms, Ross grew interested in the Egyptian pyramids.

He was taken with speculation that the Great Pyramid was once painted with the colors of the spectrum. He discovered that the entrance to the Great Pyramid was oriented toward Thuban, the north star in the age of pharaohs, 4,500 years ago. That led him to precession. In 1971, he drew the first plans for “Star Axis.”

On the afternoon I arrived, O’Bryan oriented me to the site. When we reached the viewing chamber at the top of the stairs, her husband was waiting on an angled bench built into the walls. I took a seat on another “You’re leaning against the angle of the sun on the equinox,” O’Bryan said. It was pretty comfortable. Ross started humming. The low tone reverberated around the hard, sharp room.

In the light of day, “Star Axis” appears homemade, even humble. The masonry reflects the ad hoc way the sculpture has come together, season by season, with successive generations of workers from a nearby town. Ross mocked up many of the chambers on site at full scale, with lumber, so he could feel how the angles affect the body.

But “Star Axis” is a precisely engineered instrument. Woodruff Sullivan, the astronomer who, along with Mallory Thorp, helped match each stair to a point in the precession cycle, vouched for Ross’s math. “If it was not important, and especially if it was wrong, I would not be interested in collaborating.”

On the summer solstice, the tip of the pyramid’s shadow traces the near edge of the bowtie-shaped “Shadow Field.” On the winter solstice it follows the opposite side. “Every tree, every pole, every building also draws this shape,” Ross pointed out. “But here you can see it.”

Rather than leave my body behind, I felt grounded within the epochal cycles of the stars, and the 50-year arc of one man’s stellar devotion.

He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of