Most of My Heroes

Etc., etc.

There have been a few, though. And a recent addition.

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Stamp Honors Thurgood Marshall

A new commemorative stamp honoring Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, was unveiled Friday.

The 37-cent stamp, which will go on sale in January, was unveiled at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association.

[. . .] Marshall is the ninth Supreme Court justice to be honored with a stamp. Others were John Jay, John Marshall, William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, Earl Warren, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black.

And he is the 25th in the post office's Black Heritage stamp series, which has included such leaders as Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Benjamin Banneker, Whitney Moore Young, Jackie Robinson, Scott Joplin, Sojourner Truth, and A. Philip Randolph.

I'd swear there used to be a rule against starting sentences with "And".

Continuing with Not Talking about Elvis from the previous entry:

Generations have grown up accepting the rumored remark as fact, and the animosity has lasted more than four decades. On their 1989 hit "Fight the Power," political rappers Public Enemy called Presley a "straight-up racist." A year later, the black rock group Living Color recorded "Elvis Is Dead," which included the lyrics "I've got a reason to believe / We all won't be received at Graceland."

[. . .] But, surprisingly to those who have long believed the rumored remark to be true (including this African-American reporter), it seems that he didn't make it.

"I never said anything like that," Presley told the black-oriented magazine Jet in 1957 from the set of "Jailhouse Rock." "And people who know me know I wouldn't have said it."

This issue of Jet is still available for your perusal at black beauty and barber shops across the country. No, they're not holding on to it for sentimental reasons; they still have the larger-sized issues of Ebony out, too.

Which reminds me, I was in Border's, and Essense was racked with the Women's Interests magazines. They dropped the woman-centered focus ages ago. . .

But I digress.

The racist remark first appeared in white-owned Sepia magazine as part of a story titled "How Negroes Feel About Elvis." It was alleged that Presley had made the statement either in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow's "Person to Person" TV program. But Presley had never been to Boston or on Morrow's show.

So why does the rumor persist? For one, blame the tenacity of urban legends. Folklorists define urban legends as apocryphal stories that are passed from person to person and even generation to generation as true. They can be anything from the story of the man with a hooked hand who terrorizes teenage lovers to the rumor, spread largely by e-mail, that designer Tommy Hilfiger doesn't want black people to wear his clothes.

The purpose of these tales isn't simply to spin a good yarn. In his book "The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings," professor Jan Harold Brunvand writes that these oft-told stories "reflect many of the hopes, fears and anxieties of our time."

This is largely why the Presley rumor still has relevance. There is a lot of resentment because Presley reaped more benefits from R&B-influenced music than did any black artist.

Well, that's the most sensible statement I've seen in a mainstream publication for a while.

One of the few times I've seen folklorists mentioned in a Western context, too. Well, as Western as black people in the U.S. are meant to be, anyway. The extent of this varies depending on what's being discussed.

But in the rigidly segregated world of the 1950s, Presley was able to achieve more success than any black artist. This fact keeps the shoeshine rumor going.

"'The rumor has persisted because Elvis is a symbol of so many social and musical inequities that are legitimately resented," says Peter Gural¬nick, author of the definitive biographies "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" and "Careless Love : The Unmaking of Elvis Presley."

"Had everything else been the same -- the moves, the clothes, the look -- but Elvis had been a black man, would white America in the '50s have embraced him with the same enthusiasm?" asks Patricia Turner, co-author (with Gary Alan Fine) of the new "Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America." "The answer is probably no. And there's a lot of resentment about that."

Good thing things have changed in this country, and such matters are no longer an issue.

So, I hear Eminem has a new cd out.

He's nowhere near as good as the Beasties, though. And Vanilla Ice? The less said, the better.

And apropos of nothing, missed a Fishbone show here Saturday. Funny, I don't think the black radio station (who seem to have lost their domain) mentioned it at all. . .