Margaret Walker died on this date in 1998 in Chicago at age 83. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a minister, and Marion (née Dozier) Walker, who taught her philosophy and poetry as a child. She was captivated by the bedtime stories her grandmother told her, which were often tales of slavery. She knew at a young age that she wanted to become a writer so she could write books about people of color that would not make her feel ashamed. She married Firnist Alexander in 1943. They had four kids and remained married until death did them part.

Her poem, “For My People,” was The Poetry Foundation’s poem of the day today.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street
in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.

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On a lighter note, this was the poem in The Writer’s Almanac today. It’s by Robert Lax and is called “Therapist.” [It continues the gymnastics theme we introduced recently with Olga Korbut.]

a man came to me with the
following problem:

«my mother-in-law, he said, «despises me;
my creditors, once friendly, are now all over
me; my wife threatens to leave me tomorrow
unless i put the children in a better school;
my employers criticize the tone of my work
for what they call a failure of nerve. what do
you suggest i do?»

i turned a somersault for him & he felt
better.

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Winston Churchill and Mark Twain share this date as their birthday, the former born in 1874, and the latter in 1835. They met in 1899 in London at a party. Twain was 63 and Churchill 24. Here’s how it was described to Twain later:

You [Twain] and Churchill went up to the top floor to have a smoke and a talk, and Harcourt [another guest] wondered what the result would be. He said that whichever of you got the floor first would keep it to the end, without a break; he believed that you, being old and experienced, would get it and that Churchill’s lungs would have a half‑hour’s rest for the first time in five years. When you two came down, by and by, Churchill was asked if he had had a good time, and he answered eagerly, “Yes.” Then you (Twain) were asked if you had a good time. You hesitated, then said without eagerness, “I have had a smoke.”

They met again two years later in NY. Churchill was on a lecture tour, and Twain introduced him to the audience at the Waldorf. Years later, in his book My Early Life, here’s how Churchill remembered that evening:

Throughout my journeyings, I received the help of eminent Americans, and… I was thrilled by this famous companion of my youth. [Twain] was now very old and snow‑white, and combined with a noble air a most delightful style of conversation. Of course we argued about the [Boer] war…. I think however I did not displease him; for he was good enough at my request to sign every one of thirty volumes of his works for my benefit; and in the first volume he inscribed the following maxim intended, I daresay, to convey a gentle admonition: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.”

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Article in The Onion:

25,000 Recalled High Chairs Returned To Manufacturer With Infant Still In Seat

 “To be clear, we really just wanted the high chairs back for safety reasons—we aren’t equipped to take these kids,” said Graco spokesperson Steven Sanders, describing the thousands of 6- and 7-month-olds who had arrived at the company’s loading bay strapped into the company’s defective high chairs, many with their faces still covered in food. “We’re trying to figure out the best path forward. This is an industrial factory environment, and the babies are clearly not happy here.”

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14A today: “Evidence that one is going into labor?” Ans: UNION CARD.

26A: RAISA Gorbachev. Remember her? She died in 1999. She and hubby Mikhail had one daughter, Irina. On June 1, 1990, Barbara Bush and Raisa addressed the graduating class at Wellesley College on the role of women in modern society.

Mikhail was a devoted and loving husband. He wept openly at her funeral. “One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life,” Gorbachev told Vogue magazine in 2013. He released a CD of seven romantic songs, “Songs for Raisa,” in 2009 on which he sang along with well-known Russian musician and guitarist Andrei Makarevich. He is buried next to her.

This statue of a beautiful young Raisa watches over their graves in Moscow.

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Sportsfans — you hear of Jesse Luketa? Me neither — he’s a linebacker for the ‘Zona Cardinals. Played his college ball at Penn State and was drafted in the seventh round. He drives a 2019 BMW and the front left tire had been acting up. Usually, adding some air took care of it, but last Sunday it breathed its last breath. As luck would have it (bad), he was on his way to the Stadium for the game against the Rams, and it didn’t look like he could make it in time under the circumstances.

Thinking fast (as is required of linebackers) Luketa noticed a guy in an old ‘Zona jersey pumping gas into his car. Three kids in the back were all wearing ‘Zona gear too. Bingo! He explained who he was and what happened to his tire. The guy’s wife squeezed into the back with the kids, Luketa settled into the front seat and they raced to the Stadium, arriving with 8 minutes to spare. He talked football to the kids the whole time and they were in heaven. He got them a spot in the players’ lot and met them after the game for photos. He promised them tix for the next home game.

The dad’s name was J.W. Phillips. He said they didn’t help Luketa because he was a pro football player. He was just a guy with a flat tire who had to get somewhere. Everything else was just a bonus.

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Frances Sternhagen, the Tony-award winning actress, died in her home in New Rochelle on Monday at the age of 93. She went to college at Vassar and was studying history when an adviser suggested she try drama. The rest was history — or, rather, drama. Cheers fans will recognize her as Cliff Clavin’s mom. Cliff may have gotten his habit of explaining odd facts of interest to no one from her because in one scene we come upon her explaining that the Bermuda Triangle was actually a rhombus. The following clip takes place after Cliff tells her he “met someone.”

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See you tomorrow.