camnai:you do have a sense of humor, I think.  On handshakes, as a woman shaking hands with a man: I just shake hands, firm but not crushing.

NYCartist: I suppose the internet wouldn’t be half so much fun without the
occasional misinterpretation; men of my generation have been accused of so
much of which we are in fact guilty that I am always quite happy to leap to our
defence when I sense a charge that I feel is unfounded. I also meant no further
blanket assessment of Kentucky people, of whom I know none, than to say that
it has the reputation of being a rather conservative place with only a few of its
citizens espousing the most progressive ideas of a particular time, which
women’s liberation was in the late 1960s.

    The extension of handshakes to women, to sidetrack for a moment, has
complications. In shaking hands with another man, you want yours to be ‘firm’,
indicating that you are ‘reliable’. Too much strength is overbearing and
aggressive, too little can signify, among many other things, distaste for the
person you are meeting. There is probably also, at a subconscious level,
something of ‘I’m just as tough as you are, so don’t mess with me.’ (I realize
that this is nonsense, but if your bedrock is nonsense, that’s where as a wise
man you have to build your house.) With a woman, since most men have bigger
hands, you can’t use your normal mano-a-mano handshake, because you’ll
crush hers. I do basically a ‘touch palms and let go’, figuring that she is
probably reading me in all sorts of other ways that I don’t know about, and the
handshake, other than the fact of its taking place, is not that important and will
not save me.

    However, it strikes me that another reason Muhammad Ali may have been
reluctant to shake your hand (since in fact you did offer it) was that you were—
or ‘are’—a white woman.

She was a great singer and beautiful person.

Sister Lena will be sorely missed. She had talent like no other. She had beauty like no other. She also had courage and conviction like no other. For this I as a Chicano activist and aficionado of jazz must pay her compliments!

Rest in peace, Ms. Horne!

camnai: I had a very close artist friend in KY for about two decades.  He died a few years ago.  He was both a “Kentucky Colonel” and a disability rights activist. (I’m also the latter).  He had a marvelous sense of humor.  Before I was online, he’d get printouts of things and send them to me via US mail. And he researched the lack of wheelchair access in the Congress for me, including emailing the guy in charge of the building.  And since this article is about music, I’ll add that after I heard Dr. John on the radio, my KY friend found out the info for me and I could find cassettes of Dr. John’s music.

camnai: I did hold out my hand until I realized what was happening.  Having grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family, and in my mid20s at the time of the event at the Waldorff-Astoria, I was long familiar with separation of men and women and related rules.  Many things are similar in both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish tradition: dietary rules, burial rules, are both very similar.  Halal is like kosher:no pork, etc. and burial is next day, in white shroud, pine box (as my father was buried in 1950, altho he was not fully Jewish, his mother was).

camnai, I’m reporting what happened.  I do not/did not fault the fighter for not taking my hand.  You misinterpret.  I was surprised until I figured it out.

Two quibbles, the first with Mr Robinson. Taste in singers is of course
subjective, but I think Lena Horne was indeed a great singer. More like Billie
Holliday than Ella Fitzgerald, perhaps, but she had fantastic control of her voice
throughout her entire range, great accuracy of pitch and a tremendous bluesy
attack on a note where she came in from just under it, imaginative phrasing,
and a tremendous ability to glissando.

With NYCartist: while I am sure that a prizefighter from Kentucky is unlikely in
1966 or 67 to have been the perfect liberated male, it was likely out of respect
and good manners that Muhammad Ali did not shake your hand. Unless you
held it out and he ignored it (which would have been rude even then), the rule
then was that a gentleman did not initiate physical contact with a lady. To do
so was to show disrespect both to the lady and to her escort, in this case your
relative. You can fault the widely held assumptions that manifested themselves
in that code of manners, but I don’t think you can fault Muhammad Ali, who
like Elvis Presley was always very polite, for obeying the code under which he
was raised.

A beautiful lady, her own words say it best…

“My identity is very clear to me now,” she said when she was 80. “I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

“Infiltrator” is not a good word due to its connotations, especially in relation to the time Lena Horne began her activism for human rights.  There was a good segment on http://www.democracynow.org this morning with her biographer.

In 1967 (or 1966), I stood near Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria at a fundraiser for the Free Southern Theater; I had a relative who briefly worked for the integrated theater and we got invited, coming up from NOLA where we and the theater were based.  I was awed by her beauty.  My relative was talking with Muhammad Ali and shook his hand.  He wouldn’t shake mine, as I’m a woman.