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George During a book signing at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia, Paul Gaston, author of Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea, autogaphed my book "For my friend Uriah J. Fields - Carry on! Paul Gaston." Since I moved from California via Flagsaff to Charlottesville I have heard more than a few people speak positively about Paul Gaston. Of course, not as many as I have heard talk about Thomas Jefferson, that prompted me to ask a friend, shortly after coming to this city "Has anyone other than Jefferson done anything significant in Virginia?" When I first met Gaston and listened to people talk about his involvement in the struggle for justice I understood why he was highly esteemed by African Americans and Caucasians. When Gaston, a Caucasian, was coming of age in Fair Hope, a community founed in 1884 by his grandfather who left Iowa, and later led by his father, they hoped would become a utopian community on the shores of Mobile Bay, I, an African American, was growing up in Sunflower, Alabama, located 70 miles north of Fair Hope. Of course, the distance between these two communities seemed more like a thousand miles apart, at least that is the way it appeared to be when I visited Mobile that is only 40 miles from Sunflower and about 18 miles from Fair Hope. There were other ways, including racial justice, in which the distances were even greater. Yet, in a certain way Sunflower, a nearly all-black hamlet, was somewhat founded by my Grandfather who was born there as a slave in 1862 and lived there all of his eighty-eight years. He was the chief founder of the Fields Community and the Fields School, located in Sunflower. The first eight years of my schooling was at this school. Reading Gaston's informative, inspiring and prescription-for-the-future-orientd book I discovered that Fair Hope, the first Single-Tax commuity in the nation, which advocated "no other than single land tax" was really about justice, a cause which he has championed for more than a half century. Although I participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), following my four-year tour of duty during the Korean War, and after my discharge from the military, had to fight to become a registered voter in Montgomery, Alabama, I learned many things about the Civil Rights Movement which Gaston had been a part of, particularly during the period when I had left Alabama and moved to California (1962-1995). In California my involvement in civil rights was limited to my participation in the Watts Riot in 1965 and the Rodney King Riot in 1992, both in Los Angeles. I certainly was not as greatly involved in civil rights as Gaston who was engaged with various civil rights groups cited in his book which included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Regional Council. During his participation in the historic "stand-out" demonstrations in 1963 at Buddy's Restaurant in Charlottesville he was physically attacked. He also protested the closing of schools in Charlottesville to prevent school integration which was a part of Southern Massive Resistance aimed at preventing integration. All these involvements and achievements were made by a person whose growing up years contained no misery or rebellion against his family or community and who at the age of 82 continues, as evidenced in Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea, to contribute to improving the New South which during the last half century has come a long way in practicing racial justice but still has a long way to go before equal justice for all is realized. This book is more than a memoir about a life well-lived. To be sure, it is that, but it is also a social history about an idea rooted in the Fair Hope ideal of a utopian commuity that Gaston experience during his upbringing and has since shared with people including several generations of students at the University of Virginia where he taught for more than forthy years. I read every word in this book and highly recommend it to everyone who wants to know more about the making of the New South and one person who helped to make it happen. He deserves to be honored for his role in transforming the South. To reierate, as Gaston stated in his autograph of my copy of his book "For my friend Uriah J. Fields, Carry on!" I respond with a single word that my paternal grandfather's oldest daughter used frequently, "ditto" and add these words from the final paragraph of his book, a quote from the Talmud: "It is not given to us to complete the task. Nor may we remove our hands from the plow." I predict that this book will inspire many people to renew their commitment to be presence for justice. Justice with peace just may be the true meaning of and the closest we will come to utopia on this side of Paradise. Uriah J. Fields (Electronic mail, March 17, 2010) ps: My New Book is available The Fields School: An African American
School Without Failures Located in Rural Alabama 1933-1949 by Uriah
J. Fields.
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