Review of Book

Eating Today's Bread While Still Paying For Yesterday's!
(Book Review)

1967-68 Lincoln High School - Port Arthur, Texas

When Maggie and John Harries moved to a sleepy little east Texas town, they thought that they had found the community of their dreams. Long time residents of the state (except for a couple of years in Rhode Island during John's years in the Navy and another three years after that to complete his undergraduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), they looked forward to living in a new region. They soon found, however, that the tightly knit community was just a little too tight. Anyone who had lived in the provincial town for less than fifty years was considered a newcomer. Nevertheless, John, a teacher with over twenty years' experience, liked his job, until a classroom incident led to a gross overreaction in a case of political correctness gone to absurd extremes. John had intercepted a tasteless racial cartoon from a student. Rather than destroy the offensive drawing, John asked the student to tack it up in his work area, so that its distasteful message might be discussed later in the day. However, before John could use the cartoon as a teaching tool, a lunchroom aide saw the drawing, and misconstruing John's intentions, reported the display of the cartoon to the administration. What followed was a firestorm of professional reprisals that culminated in John's summary dismissal on the grounds of his being a racist. Given no opportunity to plead his case, John and Maggie Harries sought legal counsel. Yet, though they approached over one hundred attorneys, they could not find a single one who would help them file suit against the school district. In Eating Today's Bread While Still Paying For Yesterday's!, Maggie Harries chronicles the frustrating battle to clear John's reputation as an educator and reinstate him in the profession that he loved. The irony of the story is that an insignificant occurrence in a single classroom led to the destruction of an innocent man's career, when not a year later, this area of Texas would be the site of one of the most heinous hate crimes in recent memory. For it was within only twenty miles from the school in which Mr. Harries taught that a black man would be chained to a truck and dragged to his death by three white men. It is Mrs. Harries's assertion that her husband was made a scapegoat for the seething racial tension broiling below the surface of the seemingly placid community. The author tells her family's story with an eloquent indignation at the terrible treatment her husband received from colleagues and members of the legal profession. She gives us a glimpse into their lives before the disruption to illustrate just how ludicrous the charges made against John were. Written with bracing candor and an ardent desire to see justice done, Eating Today's Bread While Still Paying For Yesterday's! is a provocative examination of how one man became the victim of the absurd standards of political correctness established to mask the rampant racism in a small Texas town.

$59.95

(black & white)
(Quantity discounts available)
ISBN 0-9708797-0-9
(Fully illustrated throughout the book)
(115 printed pages)(8 1/2" x 11")
Study Manual Format (ring bound)
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Ventureserve Publishing
Post Office Box 1758
Jasper, Texas 75951-1758

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Eating Today's Bread While Still Paying For Yesterday's!

This page was last updated on:

05/25/08 16:58