26 Jun NiteCap Journal: What Happens When the Revolution Ends?

On the drive north to Vero Beach from South Florida you’ll forget that wars even exist. 

Upon entering the dreamlike beach town called the Hamptons of Florida you’ll be refreshed to find it not as pompous as Palm Beach or flashy as Miami, because in Vero Beach wealth exist void of much fanfare as if it simply belongs. 

Perusing the art houses and wine bars a stone’s throw away from a surprisingly barren boardwalk is where you’ll find the town’s residents, primarily the nation’s uber rich. 

Beneath the boardwalk and on the surrounding beach you may often see some dreamer out surveying the sand in search of gold. 

After all, this is the heart of Florida’s famed treasure coast where pirates who looted the Caribbean took their newfound wealth, a majority lost at sea in shipwrecks caused by hurricanes. 

Nature has a way of settling all scores. 

However, I wasn’t here in search of buried treasure, at least not in the literal sense. I came to visit my college professor Dr. J whose relocation to Florida was a pleasant surprise, but a surprise, nonetheless.

I shook my head imagining these staunch conservatives meeting their newest neighbor and was still smiling at the thought when I rang the doorbell. 

A tall, chipper and bright-eyed lady, seemingly in her late 60s answered the door. 

“Oh you must be Peter,” she said, opening the door. “Dennis just can’t stop talking about you.”

“And you must be Annie,” I replied. 

“Is that who I think it is!?”, I heard Dr. J’s familiar Southern drawl holler from down the hall.

Suddenly, I saw a barefoot Dr. J saunter towards me wearing a plaid T-shirt and matching pajama pants dawning his signature University of Delaware baseball hat. 

I looked around. 

The house was similar to the one I visited all hours of the day and night as a college student after receiving any news from one of the dozens of newspapers I mailed my internship package to.  

Yet, this one had a pool with an acre of woods in the backyard. 

“Not bad,” I told him. “How’s the neighbors?” 

“Ah hell, you know where I live,” Dr. J, fired back. “These Trumpites can all kiss my ass; they’re setting us back 100 years. Seriously, F—- em.” 

Annie gave a knowing nod. 

After Jeannie, Dr. J’s wife who I remembered from college died, he found solace in the bottle for several years before posting an online dating ad. Two years later Annie replied, and the rest is history. Like Jeannie, she too is an artist, her focus being portraits.  

“We’re not gonna ask about your love life,” Dr. J joked, turning to Annie. “We’ll just say it’s complicated.”

It actually was, but we had more pressing matters to discuss. 

“I prolly got about five more years max,” Dr. J continued, motioning for me to sit in the living room. 

“That’s what you always say professor,” I replied. 

Before I could probe any further the inevitable topic of Chuck Stone’s biography came up. 

“I’ll let you boys do your thing,” Annie said, noticing the urgency of the conversation. 

Raised in Jackson, Mississippi to a household comprised of Klu Klux Klan members, Dr. J left Mississippi for the Northeast and never looked back. Becoming infatuated by the civil rights movement, he dedicated his life to fighting racial injustice, utilizing journalism as his weapon of choice. 

Along this journey he became best friends with the legendary Chuck Stone, the co-founder and first president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Stone is indeed an icon and historical giant, but I couldn’t see why now twenty years later Dr. J couldn’t move on from completing Stone’s biography. 

“Why can’t you just kick back and enjoy the rest of your days?” I asked him.

Admitting he may not be alive to finish the biography, he’s enlisted a young writer and even asked me to meet with him to see if there’s film interest. 

Deep into the wee hours Dr. J reflected on his Mississippi upbringing and incidents I had heard about in the national news, but revealed unreported details given how close he was to the perpetrators. 

“Do you think I could have done something to stop things from happening? I mean, I was just a kid,” he asked me throughout the night. 

I had no idea just how connected my professor’s life was to this nation’s dark racial history. The conversation confirmed to me something I’ve known all these years. Dr. J’s advocacy for black journalists stems in part to the sins of his Mississippi relatives. Most will call it white guilt, but I call it having a conscience, something a society currently more wired to comment than actually act may find hard to understand. 

We’re inundated with a generation of commentators. They’re everywhere giving an opinion on everything, but always slow to act in offering a solution. 

And to think that I was one of the pioneers of this new media age with the birth of NiteCap.

No, Dr. J didn’t have to dedicate his life to trying to correct the wrongs he saw in Mississippi, but his actions helped to breathe life into my own journey and that of others. It even cost him having a biological family as he refers to me and three other students as his adopted sons. A true revolution is rooted in accepting shared responsibility for this planet’s survival and those we share it with while making the sacrifices necessary to preserve that collective well-being. 

In fact, that fight is what’s most likely keeping Dr. J alive. 

That night I came to further understand that life itself is an act of revolution and most often there’s more to be gained from the fight than the actual outcome. 

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