On my new campaign website I have a rotating group of images. My French Pen pal S. has sharp eyes. S clipped out one of the photos showing me with arms outspread gesticulating to focus on the tie I was wearing. S. conjectured that there must have been something symbolic about all the blurry iconography. I snatched the tie from my closet and took a close up photo of it and commended S’s good catch.
The tie was given to me by close friends who had just visited the wonderful Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Claudia and I have been there two times. They bought me a tie with all sorts of images of Lincoln’s campaign posters.
And I did bring it to battle at a school board meeting when the school board majority used manufactured lies about a quarrelsome colleague as an excuse to overturn his election to the board and vote him off it. In doing this they were following our sleazy attorney’s tactic to so blacken his reputation that he would be soiled in the eyes of everyone in the City of Duluth. My fellow Board members were going full on Donald Trump to get what they wanted. The most loathsome lie was saying that School Board member Art Johnston had made a racist slur at a party he was at. I discovered who said it and it wasn’t Art. And it was barely racist. By the Way: Although the School Board’s Inquisitors didn’t know it Art Johnston was serving on the Board of the NAACP at the time of his Kangaroo Court.
Not sure what the NAACP is? Its the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That’s the organization that brought Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court and caused me to attend an integrated school starting in 2nd grade. I put that tie on to defend Art but I made a hash of it and it was the most terrible school board meeting I ever attended.
A short time later the Inquisitors thought I should be given a little of the same medicine they had meted out to Mr. Johnston. They censured me. It was a little Christmas gift for the holidays. My son came home from his Doctoral studies with the censure a banner headline on the front page of the Duluth News Tribune. I voted with my detractors for my censure but not because of my inept defense of Art Johnston. They had a genuine molehill of a grievance against me that I had already acknowledged. So I voted with them. Art Johnston was my lone defender bless him.
