Sammy Davis Jnr considered

There's a not so old documentary about Sammy Davis Jnr that has been on TV before, but I only saw it last night.  (Most of it, anyway.)

It fits in with something that has become a bit of theme here - as you get older, history feels closer than it used to.   As a child, something that happened 50 years before your birth feels like ancient history; but once you get into your 50's, you start thinking "hey, the 1960's doesn't feel so long ago", because you can remember bits of it directly, and lots of older people don't feel mentally much older than their perceived peak at (say) 30-ish.  Hence, anything that happened within any one lifetime doesn't now seem, in the big picture, all that long ago; and the timing of radical changes to our understanding of humanity (evolution, the "deep time" of the age of the Earth, the vast scale of the universe, etc) which are all still within roughly 150 years ago from today need to be considered in the perspective.    The intellectual and social reverberations of those discoveries have not had all that long to work themselves through.


Hence, watching the story of the rabid controversy in America that Davis Jnr's relationships with white women caused in the late 50's, but well into the 60's as well, is really eye opening.    Or things like the way blacks, at least in the 50's, had to drive way out of town to find somewhere to stay if working at Las Vegas.  (It wasn't entirely clear when that started to change.)  And the story of a motel operator being asked to drain the pool by a white person who saw Davis Jnr swimming in it, and they did (!).

This was all going on when I was a child, which isn't long ago.  It all puts nostalgia for the 1950's and 60's into perspective, and just because legislative action against discrimination happened,  no one should be surprised that lingering effects should take a long time to work themselves out.